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THE HALF-PRICE HOME LIBRARY 



I. II. No. 14 



May, 1898 



■ 



oV 



44 



EXCUSE 



ft 



WILLIAM C STILES, BJ)< 



• • 



RICE & HIRST, Agents, Publishers, 
U22 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. 



JUL 8 1W8 







XCUSE IE!" 



THE PLEAS THAT RUIN YOU 



A STUDY IN THE PERVERSITIES 
OF UNBELIEF 



BY f 

WILLIAM CURTIS STILES, B.D. 



" And they all with one consent began to make excuse." 



PHILADELPHIA 

RICE & HIRST, AGENTS, PUBLISHERS 

1122 Chestnut Street 



^ ^.4^ 

.* 



v 






■4- ^ 



^ 









■ 



9304 



Copyright, 1898, by The American Sunday-School Union 



^ OF 




JUN 1 1 io9H 

Wer of 



\> 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED- 



2n 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. You 5 

II. "I am trying to live as near right as I can"... . 11 

III. " I want to think about it" 21 

IT. " I might not hold out " 31 

V. " I am not willing to give up " 41 

VI. " I cannot feel that I am converted " 53 

VII. " I'm not good enough " 63 

VIIL " Some more convenient time " 73 

IX. " God is love : I need not fear" 83 

X. The Real Reason 95 

XL The Way is Plain 105 

XII. " What must I do to be saved ? " 115 

XIII. Settle the Question. 127 






\ 



If a man should sit in a dark room among snakes and 
toads, and think verily that it were no such, but he were 
in his bedchamber, you might persuade him long enough 
to come away and tell him of the danger ; but he will 
not stir, but laugh at you because he doth not believe 
you. But if you come into the room with a light and he 
sees them crawling all about him and making at him, 
then you need not another word to bid him begone, he 
is quickly up and leaveth them with abhorrence. We 
tell unconverted sinners of the hatefulness of their 
[excuses] and the danger that they are in, and pray 
them to leave [them] ; but they believe us not and do 
laugh. . . . But when the Spirit of God bringeth in the 
light, and they see all this with their own eyes, that it 
is even worse than we ever made it, then away go their 
[excuses] without any more ado. — Baxter. 



W 



* excuse me; 



CHAPTER L 

YOU. 

The Kingdom of God is nigh. On every 
side men are pressing into it. Many gates lead 
to the strait gate, many avenues to the nar- 
row way. The sweep of life towards the king- 
dom is great enough to prove that it is not 
a little matter to be quickly and lightly put 
away. 

To you for whom I make this little book 
eternal life is not an unimportant concern. If 
there is a heaven, you desire it. You do not 
scoff at religion. You do not mean to dismiss 
the subject once for all. The loved ones lost, 
whom your thoughts follow, you believe to be 
in God's mansions. You could not bear the 
belief that you will not at last reach them also. 
If you are listless and indifferent, you still hope 
to be a Christian before death domes. 

It is not easy all at once to make you believe 
that you are lost. You have not rejected the 



6 " EXCUSE me:' 

opportunity. You have not said boldly : " Go 
away, Christ, I care nothing for you ! " You 
perhaps are near the edges of the church. You 
engage in social work with Christians. You 
assent to and seem to understand the lessons 
in the Sunday-school. "Whatever uneasy con- 
viction you have that you are unsaved you put 
away with the thought of a future time when 
you may still do your duty. 

Above all, you have from time to time 
quieted your conscience with various excuses. 
You have become able to give reasons to your- 
self why you are not a Christian. You have 
some answers all ready for the Christian pastor, 
or the faithful Sunday-school teacher when he 
urges upon you the great question and presses 
you to decision. No ! You will not deny that 
it is a good thing to profess Christ. You desire 
to have a good hope in him. But — ! ! ! 

If you can believe there is a real place or a 
real condition properly called hell, then you 
can understand me when I tell you how sure I 
feel that " But " has made that place populous. 
" But," is hell's pavement — the very kind of a 
" But " that you unfailingly interpose when you 
are asked the question : " Why are you not a 
Christian %" "I know I ought to settle this 
question, hut ! — " 

It is to some such condition of mind that 



YOU, 7 

Christianity is ever addressing itself. We have 
all come very clearly to see that the hard prob- 
lem we have to solve is to kill But. The real 
despisers of grace, the depraved, the profane, 
the drunkard, the broad-tongued infidel — these 
and all such we can reach, convince, win, and 
save. You think it strange that I should say 
such a shocking thing, but it has been long 
ago settled with every experienced Christian 
worker that you, with a whole stock of Chris- 
tian assent, are harder to save and less hopeful 
subjects than the wicked and wanton. It is 
harder to break the back of But than it is to 
convert " I will not." 

Oh, these almost persuaded stay-backs ! 
And they are such a multitude ! You say I do 
not help matters by calling you worse than the 
scoffer. You resent the implication that one 
who respects Christ, and even intends some- 
time to settle with him — is even looking to- 
wards him and parleying with him — that such 
an one is more to be concerned for than a 
drunkard or an infidel. Does not a moral, 
even a kind of religious life count for some- 
thing ? Are you not to be credited with desir- 
ing to be on the side of religion in a general 
way? You really haven't anything against 
religion ; and you walk in some moral integrity 
before men. 



8 " EXCUSE ME." 

Well, it is not a question of calling you better 
or worse. I only said you are harder to con- 
vert. We will leave that question of your 
comparative moral standing for later considera- 
tion. Let us keep the question where I have 
put it. You are not, let us say, worse than an 
infidel or a drunkard, but perhaps you are 
worse off. If you are harder to convict, if you 
cannot so easily be turned to decision, if you 
have a hundred defenses against those who 
seek your soul to save it, it may all be true, 
may it not ? that a much worse person may be 
nearer to salvation. There is a sadness creep- 
ing over the heart of your friend when he looks 
on you. The pathos of great anxiety is in it, 
because he sees, his experience assures him, 
that you are getting used to putting the ques- 
tion away. You are not so near the kingdom 
as you used to be. You have not rebelliously 
flung hope away. You are willing to consider 
the question in your own way. But clearly, 
fatally, your friend sees that you are farther 

off. 

Will you find out in these pages, if per- 
chance I can put the case clearly, what is this 
condition into which you have come, or are 
coming? And will there not be some who 
have not gone along so far towards the final 
indifference of a lost soul, who may see in this 



YOU. 9 

word the one thing needful? Take a good 
square look at these refuges and defenses under 
which you shelter and see how false and thin 
they are. Excuses ! vain excuses ! Shall we 
not see that there is not under heaven a good 
excuse for not being saved ? " 

Go thou forth my little word into the wide 
world. Seek out the souls that still have time 
before the angel speaks, let us sit down together 
in the shadow of the temple and try to teach 
sinners the way. And if thy message, which 
is my message, be winged with the swift might 
of the Spirit, perchance we shall meet, at the 
wide open gate, a pilgrim by and by, who shall 
say amid the rejoicings of eternity, " It was the 
little book." So shall I have my great reward, 
and thou wilt have performed thine errand. 



Men who neglect Christ and try to win heaven 
through moralities are like sailors at sea in a storm, 
who pull some at the bowsprit and some at the main- 
mast, but never touch the helm. You will never head 
for a safe harbor until you take your stand at the 

wheel. — Beecher. 

< 

There is a generation of men in the world . . . who, 
because their corruptions have not left such a brand of 
ignominy on their name as some others lie under, but 
their conversations have been strewed with some flowers 
of morality, whereby their names have been kept sweet 
among their neighbors, therefore they do not at all listen 
to the offers of Christ. . . Thou art under a horrible 
delusion if thou dost not think that thou need est Christ 
as much as the bloodiest murderer, or the filthiest 
Sodomite in the world. — Gurnall. 



(10) 



CHAPTEE II. 

" I AM TRYING TO LIVE AS NEAR EIGHT AS I CAN." 

Are you ? if so, what of it ? why did you tell me 
that when I asked you to be a Christian ? Only 
a parry, was it ? Just your way of evading the 
question. Let us call it excuse number one. It 
wasn't really a good answer, was it ? You 
did not probably seriously mean that trying to 
live right is a good reason for not becoming a 
Christian, nor that trying to live right is the 
same thing as becoming a Christian. Indeed it 
would puzzle every one who ever made that 
stock, recurrent, ubiquitous reply to know why 
he does it. " I am trying to live as near right 
as I can, therefore I do not accept Christ ! " "I 
am trying to live as near right as I can, there- 
fore I do not need to be a Christian ! " You see 
how absurd that sounds ! 

But you think I have merely laughed at you. 
Not quite that ; perhaps your excuse deserves 
no more than a laugh, but with you who have 
eternity to consider and with me who have a 



12 ''EXCUSE me: 1 

charge to fulfill, the matter is more serious. I 
see plainly that you have put up another bar- 
rier between your soul and your Saviour ; and 
to see that, I do not laugh, I weep. Yet you can 
get this false, wicked excuse out of the way if 
you will read on. "We will treat it with much 
more respect than it deserves. We will con- 
sider it Avith patience. We will see if you your- 
self really like it. 

It will help us to keep coming back to this 
saying that I will now express : We ought to 
do eight. If we keep it in mind, I shall not be 
accused of teaching that right doing is of no 
consequence. It is of great consequence. The 
only question is, are you a Christian, are you 
saved, do you deserve credit, iecause you are 
trying to do right ? That question can partly be 
answered now, and partly only when we come 
to consider what it is to be a Christian, later 
along in this book. Do you not think one 
ought to try to do right, yea, actually to do 
right, whether he is a Christian, or not ? Ought 
not one to do right who never heard of Christ ? 
All men, Christian, Pagan, or Jew, ought to 
try to do right. That is because God made us 
with a conscience, with moral feelings and 
standards. You could not avoid feeling that }^ou 
ought to do right if you had been born in Tim- 
buctoo, or if your parents had been murderers. 



"LIVING AS NEAR RIGHT AS I CAN.' 1 13 

There is no more obligation to do right with 
a Christian than with an infidel. Each is com- 
manded to do right by the Lord, and one is no 
better than the other when he tries to do right. 
We should try to do right because we know 
we ought, not because we are or are not Chris- 
tians. 

But if it is plain that we ought to try to do 
right because God requires us to be righteous, 
then obviously when we do right we have only 
done our duty. You say you are trying to do 
as near right as you can. How near right can 
you do ? Just reflect that this is the answer 
you make when some one asks you if you are 
a Christian. That is the same as saying : " It 
is enough if I do as near right as I can." The 
question I wish to raise with you is this. How 
much effort to do right will satisfy the Lord's 
demands ? Are you all right with God if you 
have done as near right as you can ? Is your 
answer a good one to make when he comes and 
says in the voice of his atoning love : " Give 
me thine heart ? " 

You have not forgotten that "the law of 
the Lord is jperfectP He requires men to be 
fevfect. Offend ".in one point " and you are 
" guilty of all." Is it your duty to do right ? 
Is right doing required ? Certainly ! But not 
merely to do as near right as you can, but to do 



14 "EXCUSE ME." 

right. Not merely to try to do right ; but to 
do it. Jesus was so stringent about it that he 
told us that sin was even the wrong intents of 
the heart, whosoever shall hate is a murderer, 
whosoever lusteth in his heart is an adulterer. 
"We must be right, perfectly right, in the 
thoughts as well as in the actions. And here are 
you, with all your sins, neglects, evil thoughts, 
wrong desires, selfishness, worldliness, careless- 
ness, bad tempers, lies, and deceits and imagina- 
tions — standing up before God to answer him, 
" I am trying" — trying with a fickle will, half 
trying, trying to-day, failing to-morrow, trying 
when I feel like it and think of it. " I am 
trying to do as near right " — see what a 
wretched plea it is. As near as a sinner in his 
own pride and weakness can do. And that 
is your excuse for not being a Christian ! 

But let me not discourage even that puny 
effort to do right. God approves it, and I 
approve it. I only hate it when you set it up in 
place of a Christian life, and permit it to keep 
you from being a Christian. Since you seem 
to think so much of it, let me ask you if right 
doing isn't worth a little more effort ? "Why 
should you think it an excuse to keep you from 
Christ ? Why may it not occur to you that you 
can try to do right just the same after you are a 
Christian ? And isn't it likely to be easier to 






" LIVING AS NEAR RIGHT AS I CAN." 15 

do right if you have a Saviour to show you 
what a right life is, and lead you on into a 
right life ? Surely trying to do right, and being 
a Christian, are not two contradictory and in- 
compatible things. If you really suppose that 
right-doing is the chief end of life, even so, 
that will not be spoiled by giving yourself to 
him whom an apostle called " [Christ] our 
righteousness." I too wish to be righteous, 
but I do not see how I can be righteous without 
Christ. 

But I suspect that when a person gives this 
answer : " I am trying to do as near," etc., he 
has some falsehood hidden away under the 
phrase that is perilous and subtle as Satan's 
lies ever are. Did you not, after all, mean to 
say. " If I try to do as near right as I can that 
wiU be accepted as sufficient ? I am a good 
enough Christian if I try to do right ? " That 
is about what men mean when they give this 
answer. 

But who, then, can be lost ? "Who could not 
with equal sincerity say as much ? How good 
must a man be to be a good-enough Christian, 
and be saved ? Stand up in a line a thousand 
people, the best at the top, the worst at the 
bottom. About where in the row will you cut 
it in two and say : " These are good enough to 
be saved, and these are not? " If you are in the 



16 "EXCUSE ME." 

line you will, of course, cut it helow the point 
where you stand, if at all. But God does not 
cut it at all. He says plainly, that he has 
concluded them all in unbelief, that " there is 
none that doeth good, no, not one" For this 
reason God could not and did not offer to save 
you on account of your being good, nor on 
account of trying to be good. The one at the 
top of your line is no nearer to being saved 
than the one at the bottom. You are in the 
line, and you are lost. You cannot honestly 
declare yourself, that you are good enough to 
deserve to be saved. 

But, that you may see the extreme of this 
matter, let me say emphatically that the man 
at the top of the row would not deserve to be 
saved. If you not only had tried to do right, 
but if you had succeeded, even then you would 
only have the consciousness — a very blessed 
one — of having done what you ought to do. 
Eight-doing is not the same as salvation. No 
one can be a Christian on account of having 
done moral duties. No one can have eternal 
life because he tries to do as near right as he 
can. 

But the case is rather worse with you than I 
have stated. Right-doing never hurt any 
one's chances of heaven. Yery few have 
enough to fall back upon. But the pride of 



"LIVING AS NEAR RIGHT AS I CAN." 17 

heart about right-doing — that has shut and 
sealed the eternal doors upon lost souls, in all 
time. Tou are not worse because you try to 
do right, but only because you try to be saved 
by doing right ; or, rather, because you re- 
ject salvation so perversely and take your 
own worthless stock of righteousness as a re- 
liance. Worthless? Well, worthless as a 
saviour. It can't save you — that is what I 
mean. You haven't enough to save you, be- 
cause God requires perfection. No, rather you 
haven't enough to save you because there canH 
be enough. Souls simply are not saved that 
way. Neither by his righteousness, nor on 
account of it, is a man saved. You may not 
be morally as bad, but you are as fatally 
lost as if you were the worst soul in the uni- 
verse. 

But what a foolish supposition we make 
when we consent to say that a human being 
has any considerable stock of righteousness. 
When you say, " I am trying to do as near 
right as I can," do you not feel cheap and mean ? 
Do you think you really would like to face 
God with that in vour mouth ? It isn't true, 
is it ? And you knew it wasn't true. And 
all your life you have been sinning, 
grieving God, and laying up wrath. Let 
us turn the page a little and ask what wrong 



18 "EXCUSE ME." 

you have been " trying " to do. I do not ask 
for any bill of particulars. Get out the memory 
tablets and live that life over for a day. Look 
at the opportunities, and how you wasted 
them. Look at the time, and how you have 
squandered it. Oh, no ! You never murdered 
any one. You have been taught not to steal. 
But what about that peevish temper, that 
tongue not always careful of the good name of 
the neighbor ? But why go on with a cata- 
logue that would be absolutely endless? If 
now you think your trying to do right ought 
to be revjarded, who, think you, will forgive 
your sins? Your trying to do right hasn't 
been enough for that, has it ? And if they 
stand there with no one to forgive them, how 
will you face eternity ? 

Now I wouldn't have suggested that this 
book is for those who disbelieve in eternity. 
At least, you have some hope and some fear 
of the afterward. " He hath appointed a 
DAY." Before ever again you use that dread- 
ful excuse, " I am trying to do as near right as 
I can," take it up in your most vivid imagina- 
tion before the ineffable Presence, and ask how 
it will sound there. Your Saviour — the Man 
of the Agony — went to the shame and anguish 
of his cross because just such people as you 
were not doing right. He speaks out of his 



i 



"LIVING AS NEAR BIGHT AS I CAN." 19 

glory to your pride, against your wicked re- 
jection of that atonement. How long are you 
going to hold up that fatal, shallow subterfuge 
that prevents you from loving him \ 



i 



Seldom is the head right when the heart is amiss. A 
rotten heart will be ever and anon sending up evil 
thoughts into the mind, as marshy and fenny grounds 
do foggy mists into the air, that both darken and cor- 
rupt it. As a man's taste, when some malignant humor 
affects the organ, savoreth nothing aright, but deems 
sweet things bitter and sour things pleasant, so, where 
any domineering lust has made itself master of the 
heart, it will so blind and corrupt the judgment that it 
shall not be able to discern good from evil, or truth 
from falsehood. — Sanderson. 



(20) 



CHAPTER III. 



U I WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT." 



And how old are you ? On the whole, never 
mind ! People of all ages give me this excuse. 
Let us label it excuse number two. And it 
is the very plausible, fair-seeming thing you 
fixed up and kept by you to beat off the day of 
decision. Of course, if the house over you were 
burning, and I were to ask you why you do not 
run out and save your life, you would hardly 
think it the part of a sane soul to say, " Oh, I 
want to think about it." Here struggles a 
drowning man in the surf. The undertow has 
caught him, and he is instantly to be swept 
under. What sort of a suicidal perversity 
shall we ascribe to him when, having thrown 
him the life line and bidden him grasp it, he 
looks ~up at us inanely and cries, " I want to 
think about it." 

But you do not quite like the illustrations. 
You are not so sure there is any fire — and 
there is time anyway to put it out. Perhaps 



22 " EXCUSE ME." 

you can get ashore without all this fuss with 
the life line. Am I not a trifle fanatical to 
play on your fears, and urge you to decide so 
important a question by a sort of thoughtless, 
snap judgment that has in it no element of 
deliberate reason % Here is a position you can 
defend, perhaps. It means a great deal to be 
a Christian, and (you argue) one ought not to be 
overurged and overborne to enter upon the 
Christian life thoughtlessly. Doesn't the Sav- 
iour tell us to " count the cost ? " And there is a 

• 

great deal I do not understand (you go on to say) 
and I ought to think it over very thoroughly, 
before I decide. And this plea of mine, that 
I " want to think about it," isn't to be puffed 
away in a breath, as if it were worthless. 

Well, think about what ? Let us get right at 
the matter then, and have it out. You are not 
yet a Christian, and you say it is because you 
want to think about it. Whether you ought to 
be a Christian — is that what you want to think 
about ? Oh no ! You settled that years ago. 
If you didn't, this book may be for you, but 
this chapter will not help you much. In any 
case it cannot be in this age of the world that 
any serious soul actually can stop to debate 
that question : Ought I to be a Christian ? But 
if this was not the thing you wanted time to 
" think about " what then is it ? Whether you 



" I WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT." 23 

can be a Christian, whether you can hold out, 
how you can become a Christian, what it is to 
be a Christian — are these, or some of these, the 
things you wish to think about ? they are all 
dealt with in this book. But you already 
know you can be a Christian. You already 
know as much as you ever can know about 
holding out until you are actually on trial. 
You know how to be a Christian — at least, 
you know how to find out. And surely you 
can't expect to know what it is to be a Chris- 
tian in any other way than by becoming one. 
Really you can't just tell me, after all, can you ? 
what it is you must have so much time to think 
about. 

I hope you do not mean, " I donH icant to 
think about it." I have pierced this shell more 
than once, only to find that it was another 
vapory excuse for getting rid of the subject. 
" I want to think about it," is plausible, and 
sounds intellectual. And it is so self-deceiving ! 
There is a vast deal of nonsense in this world 
that passes for careful forethought. And there 
is no excuse more subtle which men offer for 
not doing their duty than this old threadbare 
pretense of carefully thinking the matter over. 
I have known people to get a great reputation 
by it. Every sort of obligation can be dodged 
and every weight of responsibility evaded, by 



24 " EXCUSE ME." 

simply expressing a desire carefully to " think 
about it." " We must not be in a hurry-^-oh, 
no ! Let us look at all the pros and cons — es- 
pecially to see what lions are in the way." 

Now it is in every Christian worker's expe- 
rience that this pretense sets up a barrier be- 
tween the soul and the kingdom. " I want to 
think about it," has robbed God and peopled 
perdition. It usually means, " I want to put 
the matter off. Don't trouble me to-day. I 
donH want to think about it." 

But I do not wish to let any one slip out be- 
tween the loose threads of my argument. 
" After all," you say, " that doesn't apply to 
me, I am sincere, I want to think about it in 
order to make up my mind some day. I do not 
put it away. I am really thinking it over." 

Yes — thinking over something without doubt, 
but not whether or not to be a Christian. My 
word for it, if you look inside honestly, you 
never have put thirty seconds of thought on 
that question. If you would think of that 
question, and of that alone, thirty seconds would 
not be needed. It is impossible to think on 
that question thirty seconds and fail to decide 
it. If you have ever done that, and are still 
not a Christian, then you have deliberately 
rejected Jesus Christ. But you have simply 
mistaken your ground. You have been think- 



u 



I WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT.'' 25 



ing, if you have been honest and have really 
thought at all, about other questions. 

The truth is the hardest, and the only task of 
the evangelist is to get you and such as you to 
think on the real question. You think enough, 
but upon what? Half the young people with 
whom I try to talk assume beforehand that I 
am asking them to join the church. It is a 
matter of surprise to them, when I explain 
that I do not want them, for the simple reason 
that they are not Christians. They have been 
thinking — but about what? — why, whether 
they ought to join the church. I knew one 
young man who had never become a Christian, 
as he explained it, because he could not com- 
prehend the doctrine of the Trinity. 

If I could judge by the answers I get, I 
might infer (but I don't) that people innumer- 
able would be converted, if I could explain 
clearly where Cain got his wife and how large 
the fish was that swallowed Jonah. You have 
foolishly supposed — let me guess — that if you 
can only work out clearly and carefully the 
plain system of divine truth that satisfies your 
mind, and get at all the whys and wherefores 
of Christ's miracles and redemption, you will 
then be better able to decide whether you can 
accept him. 

"Well, that question with which I began 



26 " EXCUSE me:' 

seems to recur : How old are you ? And how 
long do you want to "think about it." Ask 
some wise old man who has been a Christian 
fifty years and has thought about these Chris- 
tian things all his life. See if he understands 
clearly. If he is a simple, sincere, scholarly man 
whom you respect, he will be pretty certain to 
tell you he has been, comparatively speaking, 
finding out how ignorant he is all this time. 
Well, then, turn to that hopeless, world-hard- 
ened man, ready to drop into his grave. When 
he was your age he said just what you are 
saying. He wanted to work it all out clearly. 
He wanted to deliberate, and discover. Will he 
ever be a Christian now ? And if he does, it 
will be only when all his strength and knowl- 
edge have failed him. Did he get nearer or 
farther off by all his thought ? Farther off ! 
Farther and farther ! Life is not long enough 
even for the Christian to learn all the mys- 
teries of God's salvation. And his joy has not 
been in finding out ; but in trusting God. 
What he has found out has not been his com- 
fort. Christ himself is his comfort. JSTo, sir ! 
You will go to your hopeless grave, trying to 
" think about it." We do not become Chris- 
tians by " finding out," but by tahing Christ. 
But taking Christ is not a deliberative * 
* But see parables of Builder and King, Luke 14 : 28-31, 



" I WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT." 27 

process. If it were, it would depend on how 
much we can know. Now I am disposed to 
point out to you that our Lord was very wise 
when he left us to our feeling, and faith, and 
impulse, and not to our reasonings. We believe 
with the heart. In everything — strange as the 
statement may seem — we go after our feelings. 
We choose what we like, and we argue after- 
ward to prove that our choice was right. Men 
use tobacco, and drink whisky, because they 
wish to, and feel like it. Surely almost all 
action proceeds from our feelings. The pre- 
tense of reasoning things out is almost as false 
in other action as it is in conversion. Jesus 
plainly saw how action must be secured. Men 
would not join his kingdom because it was 
wise and best so to do. But if they could 
love him, they would do his will. So he bade 
us look at him, and love him. He showed 
himself in his lovely nature, divine and human, 
as an object of love. That is, he appealed to 
our feelings. For this reason he could be 
everybody's Christ. The wise man can accept 
him no easier and no sooner on account of 
being learned. The simple man can be a 
Christian without much reference to his igno- 
rance. And all this because it is not finding 
out about Christianity, but simply receiving 
and loving Christ that makes us Christians. 



28 u EXCUSE ME." 

If this be so, then, thiiiking about it is mere 
waste of time so far as being a Christian is 
concerned. Christ does not ask us to think, 
but to love him. Now, if I were to ask you if 
you had " made up your mind " to love your 
mother, what a trifler would you think me — 
and properly so. But how amazed every one 
would be, if you took me seriously, and put on a 
wise look, and said very slowly, " Oh, I'd like 
to think about it awhile." And you begin to 
study books about the duty of children to love 
their mother, about the virtues and graces of 
mothers in general, and of your own mother 
in particular — and when I interrupt you again 
you say, " Oh, when I get it clear in my head 
I think I may love mother" Now, my friend, 
that isn't in the least an extravagant parallel. 
You yourself believe that Christ is greater and 
better and more deserving of love than your 
mother. Yet when I say, " Accept Christ and 
love him" you think it very rational to reply, 
" I want to think about it." 

Think about IT. Sit down alone and thiiik. 
You have had a good, vapor}^ time thinking 
about irrelevant things all your life. Now put 
your mind to these very simple questions and 
answer them. Do you want to be a Christian, 
or don't you % will you have Christ, or will you 
not ? Do you want heaven most, or your own 



"I WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT." 29 

■ 

will ? Will you receive eternal life, or, will you 
prefer to think and go to perdition ? And if 
you want Christ, you know already that he 
wants you. Thirty seconds ! Thirty eye- 
flashes ! Settle the question ! 

That is thought to a purpose. It amounts 
to something. And when it is settled, that one 
act will give you more to think about profit- 
ably than the remainder of your life will suf- 
fice to conclude. Oh, no ! I do not despise 
reason, thought, meditation. I think some- 
times myself. But you have been putting it out 
as an excuse that prevented j r ou from acting. 
Thought never hurt anybody, unless it was an 
evil thought. But if you have set up that 
pride of mind, all unsanctified, on a wicked 
consideration whether or not it is better to 
love your God supremely, an eternity of un- 
availing regret will be the result. 

Yes, a Christian, a Christian alone, has a 
chance of thinking about Christ to any profit. 
The unsaved man had better quit his thinking 
instantly and settle the question. For we ought 
not to forget that whether saved or lost, God 
has purposed to give us eternity in which to 
u think about it." You ought to believe that 
it will make some difference to you whether 
your eternity in " thinking about it " be spent 
in heaven or in hell. 



My Father it is dark. " Child, take my hand, 
Cling close to me, I'll lead thee through the land ; 
Trust my all-seeing care ; so shalt thou stand 

'Mid glory bright above." 
My footsteps seem to slide. " Child, only raise 
Thine eyes to me ; then in these slippery ways, 
I will uphold thy goings ; thou shalt praise 

Me for each step — above." 

Day Unto Day. 

What to-day thou shalt provide, 

Let me as a child receive ; 
What to-morrow may betide, 

Calmly to thy wisdom leave. 
5 Tis enough that thou wilt care. 

Why should I the burden bear ? 

As a little child relies 

On a strength beyond his own, 

Knows beneath his father's eyes 
He is never left alone, 

So would I with thee abide. 
t • t • t • • 

John Newton. 



(30) 



CHAPTER IV. 

" I MIGHT NOT HOLD OUT." 

Excuse number three! And it is to be 
confessed at the outset that it is usually more 
sincere and a great deal more respectable than 
the two we have considered. The way is 
sprinkled with backsliders, and it is honorable 
in you that you do not wish to belong in their 
ranks. Wrecks of false endeavor they are, cast 
up on every barren shore, warnings that point 
and emphasize the solemn w^ords of our Lord: 
" No man having put his hand to the plow and 
looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God." 
And many a young soul, inquiring the way of 
life, has been stopped almost at the door on 
seeing these stumbling-blocks. If they ran 
well for a season and then failed, how shall 
I be sure ? I could perhaps begin, but could I 
hold out ? 

Moreover, you do not desire, as a Christian, 
merely to have a name to live. We have seen 
the sad spectacle that makes men pause at 
the doorway. The church is burdened — some 



32 " EXCUSE ME." 

even would say cursed — with members who are 
ashamed or afraid to abandon it, and yet are 
lost in worldliness and sin. Many of them you 
suppose joined the church very young — knew 
not what the step meant, and have no longer 
any faith. They were sincere, they meant to 
be Christians, but here they are, members of 
the visible church of Christ, yet without in- 
terest in him, setting before the world the 
example of a professor who does not possess, 
hollow and whited sepulchers, at which the 
world points its finger, and over whom the 
church weeps. "Why might you not some day 
be like these ? And for fear you might, you 
refuse to begin. 

Let me say for your encouragement that an 
apprehension of this kind does credit to your 
sincerity. It shows plainly that you have seen 
the decisive and final character of Christian 
conversion. It is a once-f or-all matter. It is 
not something with which to play fast and 
loose. 

It is " all for Jesus " or all for antichrist with 
you. No half-way work ! No looking back 
if ever you do cast the die ! So far the habit of 
considering whether you can hold out may have 
prepared you for decision. But, on the other 
hand, it brings out in you the fears that prevent 
decision. It may even be that you have counted 



" I MIGHT NOT HOLD OUT." 33 

up the chances, and having examined yourself 
as well as you can, and having seen so many 
worldlings and backsliders, you have said that 
you do not dare to begin. But consider what 
that means. 

It means in the first place that you w^ill not 
embrace the only chance you have to be 
saved. Suppose it all to be as you fear? Sup- 
pose you stand some chance of backsliding, nay 
even suppose one half of those who are apparent- 
ly converted do backslide. What then ? Every 
saved soul in heaven to-day stood the same 
chance. If there are any " chances " abtfut it, 
the only way they got to heaven was by taking 
those chances. If you feel sure that you are 
liable to backslide, or go back to worlclliness, 
while having a name to live, nevertheless, if 
that is the only way to heaven, you ought to 
run the risk. Even if you are finallv lost you 
are not more surely nor fatally lost than you 
are if you do not begin. If it be a question of 
" chances " or probabilities, you have one chance 
in two to go to heaven. If you do not begin 
you have no chance at all. 

But your refusal to decide for Christ and 
accept him, through fear of not holding out, 
means, again, that you misunderstand the re- 
quirements of a Christian life. By the very 
nature of it no one can tell beforehand what 



34 " EXCUSE me:' 

his own ability to live it will be. You haven't 
in fact anything at all to do with the question 
of holding out. I am aware that some disputed 
theological implications enter here to confuse 
the question. But no Christian teacher teaches 
you that you can keep yourself in the Christian 
life. How consistently you may be able to live 
it — that will depend on yourself and on a million 
circumstances that you cannot possibly fore- 
know. In this sense a Christian life is largely 
experimental. "We simply have to try it, and 
go on meeting the difficulties as they come, day 
by day. Christian living is in this like life in 
any other phase of it. We find it out only by 
living it. If you never undertook other things, 
until you knew how you were coming out, you 
would be called cowardly and foolish. The only 
way possible to test the matter is to go on. 

But your hesitation to begin means once 
more that you are not yet ready to begin rightly. 
It was absurd of us to talk about chances, was 
it not ? I did it only to meet your own posi- 
tion. Now let me declare with all my soul that 
we are not left to chances. On the other hand 
I can predict your downfall now with almost 
absolute certainty, if you are merely calculating 
the chances of your own strength. You have 
no " chance " of "holding out." If you " endure 
unto the end " it will not be by chance. It will 



" I MIGHT NOT HOLD OUT." 35 

not be because you had some natural " staying 
qualities." If you mean to begin by trusting 
to any such miserable calculations — if you ever 
do begin — you may surely expect to fail. 

But, because you can plan a sure way to fail, 
you may be quite as sure there is a way to 
" endure." There is, there must be, some cer- 
tainty in this matter. It cannot be that all 
these wrecks of what promised to be Christian 
life are accidental — dependent upon chances. 
Did they not begin badly ? Were they not on 
the wrong track somehow? If Christianity is 
for all of us, and if the consequences of reject- 
ing Christ or of falling away from him are so 
tremendous for the soul, then ought there not 
be some sure way to be saved, and saved for- 
ever f Is it necessary or right for you to stand, 
shivering in fear to begin, lest you may not be 
able to hold out? Now, for one, I believe 
there is a way to be sure. I am certain that 
your excuse, though it may be sincere and 
creditable to you in some ways, is, after all, a 
useless and dreadful excuse. I do not mean 
that I can be sure of holding out— that isn't 
the right language of it. I mean that there 
ought to be, and there is, a way to begin a 
Christian life with the assurance, as strong as 
God's eternal promises, that we shall be saved 
in heaven in the day of final rewards. 



36 " EXCUSE ME." 

I want to show you how to begin right, but 
I cannot do it all in this chapter. At this 
point I wish chiefly to say that we can and 
must begin by casting off utterly and forever 
this fatal idea that we can of ourselves " hold 
out." Christian life is faith life, not merely 
will life. We have not to "hold out," but 
only to " he held." We must come to Christ. 
We cannot come to Christ and stay by our- 
selves, at the same time. We must make a 
complete self-surrender. You despise a half- 
way life, and so does God. But a half-way 
life has its cause, its explanation. It shows, 
it always shows, a half-way consecration. 
The people who backslide never are obliged to 
slide back very far. They did not make a 
complete work of it. Their very beginning 
was a half-way work. I do not invite you to 
that. If you have any reservations to make 
when you profess to take Christ, you simply 
do not take Christ, no matter what or how 
many things you may sincerely abandon. The 
one thing you do not abandon for him shuts 
him out entirely. And when you backslide, 
you only find, in fact, that you never really 
had sufficient hold on Christ. 

The one deciding act of consecration that 
makes it effectual is that which trusts us with 
Christ, to keep and hold us. In one sense that 



" I MIGHT NOT HOLD OUT. 1 ' 37 

is coming to Christ. No soul will ever fatally 
backslide who begins and who goes on in a 
life of trust. There is no experiment about 
this. There is experience, but God's word 
stands behind. He is able to keep. 

The soul that on Jesus hath leaned for repose 
I will not, I will not desert to his foes. 

If that is your condition you can fail only when 
Christ himself fails. You go on, and you reach 
heaven then, not because you hold out, but be- 
cause he holds out. You "endure unto the 
end," not because you are strong, but because 
of that which the Father hath given him he 
shall lose nothing, but shall raise it up at the 
last day. 

Your excuse, then, is shattered. It is true 
enough that you cannot hold out, but it is 
more blessedly true that you do not have to. 
I mean that your dependence is not and cannot 
be on the persistent exercise of your will, strug- 
gling to be holy, but must always be on the 
keeping power of Christ, and your trust in him. 
And when you have come to see the truth of 
what I have said upon this point, you may 
also see that this fear of not holding out is not 
really the thing that holds you back. It is 
something else. It is the unwillingness to do 
a thorough work. After all, much as you ap- 



38 " EXCUSE ME." 

prove a thorough-going Christian life — much 
as you disapprove backsliders and worldings 
— well, after all, you are not ready to go at 
this matter yourself, and keep nothing back. 
You have come right to the point now. These 
backsliders and wordlings are before you. 
You know how they failed. You know how 
you may succeed. You can pay the price and 
make sure of Christ and life eternal, but you 
can't make sure of anything with a reserva- 
tion. The whole question, the only question, 
is, will you have Christ, and willingly lose 
everything else ? Will you begin right, and 
make the work effectual ? And for you, the 
issues of eternity are in your answer. 



What madness to be afraid of belonging too fully to 
God ! It is fearing to be too happy, it is fearing to love 
his will in all things, it is fearing to become too coura- 
geous in bearing the crosses that must be allotted to 
us ; to have too much of the consolation of God's love, 
too much freedom from the miseries of human pas- 
sions. — Fenelon. 

The beauty of all worldly things is but as a fair 
picture thrown upon the ice that melts away with 
it. — Burroughs. 

All worldly things are like the sea ebbing and flow- 
ing ; or like the moon always increasing or decreas- 
ing, or like a wheel always turning up and down. 
— Ambrose. 

Earthly things when we have them we are not sure 
of them ; like birds they hop up and down now on this 
hedge and anon upon that ; none can call them his 
own.— Gurnall, 



(40) 



CHAPTER V. 

" I AM NOT WILLING TO GIVE TJP." 

Ah, there is the pinch ! If you become, a 
Christian must you not give up that — ? well 
never mind what. It is in your mind. It 
makes up the force of excuse number four. 
Sometimes you quote this excuse, oftener you 
conceal it. On the whole, it is not a position 
of which you are proud. Besides you do not 
believe that your choice is final and fatal. 
Somehow, you hope there may prove to be a 

way to have Christ and have that too. Or 

you think after you get weary of that or get 

all satisfaction of it, there will still be time to 
think of being a Christian. "Why should I be 
so strict about it? Must one give up every 
good and pleasant thing of this world in order 
to be a Christian ? How much and what must 
I sacrifice? 

And, perhaps, you have been befooled into 

half believing that it is quite better to think 

about " one world at a time," and to try to get 

all there is while it is going by. You only 

half believe that Christ and his religion now 

41 



42 " EXCUSE me:' 

are worth more than that ! That means 

— of course you must see it — that you have 
put Christ and his religion in comparison with 
something else, and have preferred the some- 
thing else. You say no? But it is actually 
so. You have chosen / and you have not chosen 
Christ. Whether or not your choice is irre- 
trievable, it is a choice. It proves, no matter 
what you say, that to-day you think more high- 
ly of, and love more dearly, something else. Turn 
that over a thousand times and every time you 
come back to it, it will be the same. You will 
keep that , and not choose Christ. 

What is that ? 

I do not know in your particular case, but in 
every case it is either a selfish enjoyment or a 
secret sin. Very frequently it is a worldly 
pleasure. Frequently, it is a pastime, or a rec- 
reation, which may have in it per se no moral 
quality at all. Is it the dance ? And if it is, 
I wonder if you are not going about telling 
how David danced before the Lord. And 
when I mentioned the fact that I saw you 
going to a ball-room was it not you who began 
to argue that there is no harm in dancing? 
" All the best people and many church members 
dance," you argued. And all before I said a 
word about it pro or con. I wonder what 
makes you so quick to prove to yourself that 



<i 



I AM NOT WILLING TO GIVE UP." 43 



there's no harm in it ? Or, perhaps, it is the 
cards, and so frequently do I hear you discus- 
sing the matter ! You are so very protesting ! 
Surely there can be " no harm in a quiet game 
of cards ? " Or, perchance, it is the theater. 
And then I get whole flippant and voluble as- 
surances upon the educational value of the 
drama. And all that— of course it sets me 
thinking. 

Pleasures of the world ! And if now I might 
only go at you " hammer and tongs," so to 
speak, and denounce these things ! You feel 
certain I can't prove them to be wrong! And 
whenever you can get up some argument on 
the matter, and get the minister to take ground 
against all these things, then vou get furnished 
with a club at once. " And when he asks vou 
to be a Christian, you can turn on him and say, 
" I like to dance, or play cards, or go to the 
theater, and I don't believe these things are 
wrong. You say they are wrong, and I can't 
be a Christian unless I give them up, and I'm 
not ready to give up things I don't believe to 
be wrong," etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam. 
Now that isn't a fancy sketch. Every pastor 
comes upon that attitude of mind and upon 
just such people as you every time he goes out 
calling. 

But I am too old a bird for that bait. It 



44 " excuse me:' 

has been a long time since I discussed the ques- 
tion whether these amusements are wrong or 
not. I am studying you. And you are moder- 
ately transparent in some aspects. JWha.t is 
that feeling inside, my friend, that sets you 
rushing off to the defense of certain things 
that you like to do ? Is it the dead certainty 
you feel that it is all right for you to do them ? 
Oh, yes. You can prove that the practices are 
right and innocent. You can beat us all on 
that argument. But about you. If you had 
no doubt about doing these things, really, do 
you think you would need to argue the case? 
Did you ever hear anybody trying to prove 
that it is not wrong to go to a prayer-meeting ? 
or read God's word ? or eat oysters ? People 
do not apologize for and defend things about 
which they have no doubt. 

"What is the trouble ? 

Why simply this. You know, with a dreadful 
certainty that haunts you, that you have chosen 
these things and have not chosen Christ. 
Granted they are not wrong — take your own 
position; right or wrong, good or bad, you 
have preferred them to Christ. 

That is the trouble ! 

Do you not see that it is yourself that makes 
this issue? I haven't made it. Your pastor 
will not make it if he is wise. And he need 



u 



I AM NOT WILLING TO GIVE UP." 45 



not. You have made it yourself. Your very 
readiness to defend certain practices shows 
how conscience accuses you. Nay more. It 
shows that whatever I think, or others, you 
yourself have doubts whether you ought to 
cling to these things. Prove them right till 
doomsday, you do not think it quite right for 
you to do them. If you did, you would think no 
more of arguing about them, than about the 
Tightness of a prayer-meeting. 

But you do more than say they are right. 
You have said they are worth more than 
Christ, more than heaven, more than eternal 
life and eternal blessedness. Whatever it is you 
cannot give up, that thing it is that keeps you 
from Christ. Must you give up card-playing? 
Answer yourself! Do you think you must? 
Already you have said it. If you are in any 
doubt, if you have raised the question, then 
you must or you never t3an be his. It is so of 
everything, of anything that you do or have, 
— right or wrong, good or bad — have your 
own opinion about that — but, if you believe, if 
you even suspect that it will hinder you from 
a complete self -surrender, you must give it up. 
I say this that you may not be deceived. It is 
not a question whether a thing is wrong. The 
question is, can you do or have it in that hour 
when you accept Jesus Christ. 



46 " excuse me: 1 

Now, some who read this, I suppose, have 
already said, " No ! if I ever become a Chris- 
tian, I must give this up." With one it is the 
tobacco habit, with another the theater, with 
another licentiousness, with another the ball- 
room. But saying this, thousands keep the 
sin or the pleasure, and cast Christ away. If 
you have done that, I want a word with you. 

In the first place, are you prepared to stand 
bv that choice ? Granted that this matter is 
quite innocent in itself, do you at last feel like 
saying : " Go away, Nazareth man — I want to 
dance a while longer. Shut the door on him, 
pals ; I must play cards a few years more. 
Theater and Christ do not chime, but I like 
to go, and Christ must wait." Is it worth 
while ? And are you going to stand by that ? 
How do you like that choice now I put it so 
very plainly ? And when in the night watches 
you hear the voice of your soul, what does your 
immortal soul say ? And when, in your better 
visions, the vanished faces look out from heaven, 
what woe is on them. Esau, Esau, " carefully 
and with tears," didst thou seek a place for 
repentance, but the birthright at least brought 
thee a mess of pottage. And here is a soul 
that Christ died for, exchanging itself for a hop 
and skip in a ballroom and a game of whist 
at midnight. How the bells toll ! 



" J AM NOT WILLING TO GIVE UP. 11 47 

Take it all, thou soul. You like some of 
these glittering things, gilded and glaring, 
better than you like Christ ? Very well. Take 
them. Dance now. Play your whist. Take 
the world, take it all. Take as much as Solo- 
mon had on that day in his old age when he 
sat down in the weary deserts of a wasted life, 
and wrote across the face of every mortal good 
under heaven : " All is vanity." Now are you 
satisfied ? What have you gained ? You said, 
" I can't give up these things." Well, you have 
had them, Solomon ! You are " enjoying " 
them world-soul ! Why will you not believe 
me ? They are worthless. They will not leave 
even a shadow of peace. Pastimes at best, 
sins at the worst. If they do not curse you, 
they cannot bless you. What a precious and 
mighty satisfaction it will be when you lie on 
your dying bed and eternity is at hand to re- 
member — what ? Whist ! A ball ! A play at 
the theater ! The perishing world that slips 
from you forever. And for these — for this, 
dust, ashes, trifles and follies, you risked and 
lost the mansions of glory and the forgiveness 
of your God ! 

Suppose it to be true that you must give 
them all up. (You have said it, and not I.) 
Even so, it is very little to do. You will never 
miss them. They are no sacrifice. You would 



48 u EXCUSE me:' 

laugh at me if I said you haven't the heroism 
to give them up if you wished to. And ever 
let the time come when you love anything very 
much, and these things are in the way, you 
know how quickly you will sweep them from 
your horizon and never regret them. And so 
the trouble after all has not been stated. It is 
not these things after all that prevent you 
being a Christian. Because I well know it is 
not that, I never argue with you about them. 
The trouble is you don't love Christ. When 
you do, these things may or may not be aban- 
doned, but they surely will be if they interfere 
with your love for Christ. 

I have told you how worthless everything is 
but Christ only. But you knew it, away down 
in your heart, before. Only the knowledge 
hasn't saved you. You do not choose him. 
But while you are haggling and dallying over 
a secret sin, or a selfish pleasure, what if some 
supreme vision of Jesus might break in at your 
whist-table or your dancing party ? What a 
contrast I am making you say ! Oh no, I am 
not making it. You make it yourself. Here 
is a dreadful cross, agony of death, bleeding 
brows where the thorn-crown sat, bleeding 
hands where the nails pierced him, bleeding 
side where the Roman spear opened the 
"fountain filled with blood." And now, just 



" I AM NOT WILLING TO GIVE UP." 49 

figure the astonishment of your soul to hear 
him say, " I must escape, I cannot give up my 
very life for you." Oh, that is almost blas- 
phemy. No no ! u He poured out his soul 
unto death." 

" He gave he gave his life for thee." 

Cannot give up that ? Shame ! Shame ! 

That a man can stand clutching worthless 
pastimes in the face of that spectacle where, for 
undone sinners, Christ " gave up " himself — 
transcendent sacrifice of atoning love ! 

But nothing yet, in all this, has indicated that 
you do in the least comprehend Christian self- 
surrender.' 

Do you then really think a soul ought to 
stand there before Christ and say, u How much 
must I give up ? Must I give up this practice 
or that sin ? " Not so can you be a disciple. 
You must come up higher yet, the Bible being 
true, Christ will not have you, and you canH 
■choose him, so long as you weigh these worth- 
less things of your selfishness against him, and 
question whether, with great groaning, you will 
not be obliged to give them up. Not until that 
majestic, transcendent cross has broken down 
your liking for anything else, are you Jit to be 
his. Not until you come and say : " My Lord, 
my God, show me how much I can give 



50 M EXCUSE ME." 

up, take everything, only take me — can you 
find him. Then you shall find him, then you 
shall be satisfied, then, with all your soul, 
you shall sing : 

" Take the world, but give me Jesus. n 

Oh, halting soul at the gateway, fling down 
those wretched whatevers, that now you love 
more than you love God ! 

Heaven is worth more. 

Believe that, and choose now ! 



) 



" You are too apt to feel that your religious expe- 
rience must be the same as others have ; but where will 
you find analogies for this? Certainly not in nature. 
God's works do not come from his hands like coins 
from the mint. It seems as if it were a necessity that 
each one should be in some sort distinct from every 
other. No two leaves on the same tree are precisely 
alike ; no two buds on one bush have the same unfold- 
ing nor do they seek to have. 

I heard one man say to another : Did you have such 
awful feelings as you describe ? I never had any such 
feelings ; and I am afraid I am not a Christian. The 
other man says : You say that the moment you thought 
of religion you broke out into rapture ; but I did not. 
I was two months without the dawn of the light, and I 
fear I am not a Christian. Each thinks he is not a Chris- 
tian because he did not feel as the others did, one . . . 
because he did not feel joyous, the other . . . because 
he did not feel bad."— Beecher. 



(52) 



CHAPTEE VI. 

" I CANNOT FEEL THAT I AM CONVERTED. 5 9 

There was once a spring of water that ran 
through an underground channel. A thirsty 
settler came and sat on a dry and sandy patch 
directly above the spring, and there he died of 
thirst. He was only waiting for the spring to 
come in sight. 

A sick man once said, " I do not feel as if 
this physician's medicine would cure me," and 
so he lay and died. 

A lazy man with a large family sat down one 
day and said, " I don't feel like working to 
support my wife and children," and so he 
worked no more, and the family soon became 
paupers. 

But these men were wise and energetic in 
comparison with the people who, being un- 
saved, sit down hopelessly and say, "I don't 
feel as if I were converted." 

In our enumeration of the perversities of 

unbelief there is no excuse more senseless 

than this, for not being a Christian. We will 

53 



54 "EXCUSE ME." 

label it excuse number five. And it would 
astonish one without a working experience in 
soul-saving, to know how many make it. Yery 
rarely in these days do we meet men, like a 
young Scotchman of my acquaintance, who 
makes this excuse and believes in it. This 
young man is a hyper-Calvinist, who believes 
that God elects and reprobates, and that when 
he elects any one he will make it known by a 
miraculous feeling which he calls — mis-calls — 
the witness of the Spirit. But he has this in 
common with all those who hold this excuse ; 
he thinks he must have and feel a feeling like 
that which somebody has described to him. 
Oh, the mischief of it ! 

Blessed is Christian experience ; wicked and 
disastrous is the attempt to make others feel 
that they must have your experience. When 
one says, " I haven't felt so and so," what does 
he mean? to what does he refer ? 

Always, invariably, to the feeling he has 
heard some other person express. Did they 
once agonize all jiight in remorse and peni- 
tence ? "I never felt that way " — and so I 
am not converted. Very probably you are not 
converted, but if not, it was not because you 
" did not feel that way." When so and so " ex- 
perienced religion," he was so happy and ex- 
hilarated, he acted like a drunken man. But 



" I CANNOT FEEL THAT I AM CONVERTED:' 55 

you never had that kind of a feeling. If it 
only would " come " to you — how glad you 
would be. 

Mrs. Green was a Christian in a church of 
which I was once pastor. She was a worker, 
a saint, one of God's chosen vessels. But she 
taught little to her Sunday-school class save 
her own feelings. She had them genuinely, 
she was happy, even sanctified, if such experi- 
ence can be in this life. But no one of her 
class was converted. I questioned them often. 
Every one of them had fixed his type of con- 
version. They did not " feel " like Mrs. Green. 
The whole Sunday-school was affected. "With 
the very best intentions, this loyal Christian 
was keeping several score of young people out 
of the kingdom. This was, fortunately, proved 
a little later. Mrs. Green left the church to 
join a holiness society. "Within the next year, 
by carefully teaching the Bible truth about 
conversion, whole classes in that Sunday-school 
came out into a Christian life and into the 
church. 

No sir ! There never will be any virtue, nor 
any conversion, on account of feeling as some- 
one else has felt, Tou may have " that feel- 
ing " you are waiting for, or you may not. 
"Whether j^ou do or not, neither the presence 
of it nor the absence of it will be conversion. 



56 " EXCUSE ME." 

Neither the feeling nor the lack of it will 
prove that you are converted. The great prob- 
abilities are that after you are converted you 
will have some feeling about it. You ought to 
feel deeply that you are not a child of God. 
You ought to be sorry for your sins, and hate 
your sins. But, before and after, whatever of 
feeling you have, more or less, will not prob- 
ably be like anything you ever heard another 
person describe. It will be your own experi- 
ence. If you are honest you will not profess 
any feeling you do not have. You will be 
strictly honest about it. You will not, if you 
are wise, lay much stress on your feelings as 
an evidence of your acceptance with God. 

Is it not apparent to you, my friend, that 
conversion cannot possibly be a feeling? . 
Think ! and do not misunderstand me. There 
are frequently, usually, great spiritual experi- 
ences accompanying conversion. But if one 
has great feeling he cannot bring it on nor pre- 
vent it. If he brings it on, then it is a mere 
worked-up matter that can only injure him. 
"Worked-up feeling about religion is dangerous 
and dreadful. It is the attempt to counterfeit 
the holiest of all experiences. It is mocking 
and playing mimicry with the Spirit of God; 
But if we cannot call up emotion, nor work it 
out ourselves by any effort, then either our 



" I CANNOT FEEL THAT I AM CONVERTED:' 57 

conversion is not dependent upon it, or else we 
are not responsible for our own conversion. 
But if we are not responsible then we have 
nothing to do but to sit down and wait until 
the feeling comes. And this is just what you 
are doing — with thousands of others, who have 
supposed that conversion is somehow & feeling 
sent to us. 

But if this is so, then what becomes of our 
Lord's atonement, and the Christian religion ? 
My Scotchman then is pretty nearly right, is 
he not? And only those can go to heaven and 
be God's children who have this feeling sent 
down to them. That man on his sand-patch 
will really die of thirst unless the underground 
spring miraculously breaks out at his feet. 

Oh, no ! This is an easy, free-grace religion. 
It is wicked to teach that anv man who will 
cannot be converted, converted now, converted 
without regard to the kind or quantity of feel- 
ing that " comes " to him. And when you sit 
down and say, " I haven't become a Christian 
because I haven't felt that I am converted," you 
prove that you have not tried to find out what 
conversion is. Of course you haven't felt that 
you are converted. Most probably the reason 
is, that you are not converted. My question is : 
Why do you not go about it ? 

Go ABOUT IT. 



58 « EXCUSE me:' 

Yes, and do it now ! 

Is it, then, something you can do ? That is 
the very, exact, actual thing it is. Something 
you must do, and not, never, by no means, some- 
thing you must wait to feel. Do not take a 
step, do nothing else, until you * have made 
that clear as daylight. If any one hereafter 
ever attempts to confuse you by asking how 
you feel, make confusion forever impossible by 
a complete, final, and clarified understanding 
that conversion is not something you feel, but 
something you do. It is not a somewhat that 
comes to you, but a decision to which you 
come. It is not a sand-patch to sit down upon, 
but a well for you to open with your spade. 
It is not a doctor's medicine to feel like taking, 
but a soul-cure actually to take. Be sure, be- 
yond controversy, if your soul is lost at last, it 
will be because you did not act, not because 
you did not feel. 

"What you must do to be saved will be found 
in a later chapter. But I am insisting now 
that it is a doing, not a feeling. Not only so, 
but it is a doing, God being good, that is pos- 
sible to every one on earth. If God wants us 
to be saved, he must put it in our power to be 
saved. If there is any part whatever that is 
left for us to do, it must be something we can 
do. Now, if it were necessary for me to feel 



" I CANNOT FEEL THAT I AM CONVERTED." 59 

somehow, that I canH do. No one can. It is 
not in our power to have certain feelings. It is 
not in our power to experience religion. It is 
not in our power to feel sorrowful and to feel 
happy in any given way or degree. And be- 
cause it is not, God, knowing our limitations, 
has not given us an impossible task. He has 
not required us to feel, when we cannot feel, 
to be sorry when we cannot be sorry, and 
elated when we cannot be elated. With such 
things we have little to do. Over them we 
have little sincere control. But he has given 
us something plain, simple, and easy to do in 
order to be saved. Your business is to begin 
and do it. 

Again, let me not be misunderstood. I do not 
despise religious feeling. On the contrary, 
religious experience is mostly feeling. Love 
and joy are feelings in the best sense of that 
word, and love and joy are the chief experiences 
of the Christian life. We all desire to feel 
happy in Christ. We all ought to feel penitent 
for sin. But what I am trying to teach you is 
the one plain, fundamental fact, that God does 
not excuse you from being converted, nor from 
being a Christian, because you do not feel as 
you ought and may. For now you are ready, 
having read thus far, to learn that you were 
very foolish to expect Christian feeling while 



60 " EXCUSE ME." 

you are not a Christian. When you have done 
the one needful thing that God requires, the 
strong probabilities are that in your own way 
you will " feel " converted. What a bather he 
would be who stood on the bank complaining 
that he could not feel the water, or the warmth 
of the water. He doubtless will if he plunges 
in. No, you will never " feel" that you have 
"experienced religion," until you become a 
Christian, by doing the things that make you 
a Christian. 

Farther than this I cannot go. You still 
may be left unsatisfied. I know how prevalent 
and tenacious your excuse is. If it were a rea- 
sonable, intellectual excuse, it would not be so 
hard to kill. But when I am all done, you go 
right back to the beginning again and say, 
" Well, I don't feel — ." That, my friend, is 
the final, unexplained perversity of unbelief. 
You will not do the will of God, because you 
do not feel like it. That is to say, this will that 
God gives you, you refuse to use. If God will 
work a miracle to make you feel, somehow you 
think, perhaps, you might be a Christian. It 
isn't so. It is your own surrender, your own 
love, that God requires. He will never require 
less. It is this, and this alone that makes you 
his child. Feeling this way or that does not 
do God's will. If you will not start for heaven 



a 



I CANNOT FEEL THAT I AM CONVERTED." 61 



until you have that feeling you are looking for, 
you will never start. It never came to any 
man in any other way than the way of personal 
action in self-surrender to God. Do that! 

But, finally, you have lied to yourself when 
you said you had not experienced enough feel- 
ing. Sinners feel, as well as Christians. God 
has already sent you the only kind of feeling 
that an unsaved soul can possibly have. The 
feeling that you ought to be a Christian is the 
Spirit's voice. The longing to have a Chris- 
tian's joy and peace is God's gift. The moving 
effects of Christian hymns, of the word preached 
in your ears, thoughts of loved ones in heaven, 
aspirations after Christ's holiness, ideals of a 
holy life in him, all these are the arguments of 
God's Spirit to make you feel. Why do you 
postpone, and excuse, and dally ? 

Did I go far astray when I spoke of the per- 
versity of your unbelief ? This is the mystery 
of a lost soul. He has looked at the suffering 
Redeemer and his cross, lifted up to draw all 
men to himself, and has said in his heart, " I 
cannot be his, I will not do his will, because 
I do not feel like it." 

Oh, that one can Jook on that patient Yictim, 
and say so ! Break, stony heart. If thou canst 
not feel for this — then in terror remember how 
he has died for thee in vain ! 



He that for giving a draught of water to a thirsty 
person should expect to be paid with a good plantation, 
would be modest in his demands compared with those 
who think they deserve heaven for the little good they 
do on earth.— Franklin. 

As the apple is not the cause of the apple-tree but the 
fruit of it, even so our good works are not the cause of 
our salvation but a sign and a fruit of the same. — 
Cawdray. 

All moral virtues are in themselves good, but they 
can never make you spiritually alive; it is only grace 
and union with Jesus Christ by the Spirit that must 
make a man spiritually alive. — Bridge. 



(62) 



CHAPTER VII. 



" i'm not good enough. " 



It is a study full of sad and mysterious inter- 
est to inspect the psychological involutions of 
an unbeliever. Hudibras contains a verse to 
which my mind frequently reverts when I 
think of the shiftings of the carnal mind. It 
describes the motions of a serpent : — 

11 He wired in and wired out, ■ 
And left the gazer still in doubt 
Whether the snake that made the track 
Was going in or coming back." 

Some feeling like that which arises upon seeing 
these writhings affects me when I cast up the 
excuses of men for not being saved. "With 
seemingly utter unconsciousness, I find the sin- 
ner on both sides of the same question. It is 
difficult to pin him to one spot. In one breath 
he will exploit his moral standing, in the next 
he will declare he is not good enough to be a 
Christian. When I try to make him feel his 

sins in order to bring him to the Saviour, he 

63 



64 " EXCUSE me:' 

urges them himself as a reason why he will 
not come. 

For certainly we must all admit the truth of 
what the sinner declares. He is not good 
enough to be saved. Certainly not. He is not 
good enough to come to Christ. Certainly not. 
We have read in the second chapter of this book 
something about the worthlessness of goodness 
as a ground of salvation. But you will make 
no mistake, unbeliever, if you continue to em- 
phasize this statement. Reiterate it and believe 
it. Neither you nor any other mortal has ever 
been good enough to be a Christian. It is 
nothing new you are saying. You may make 
a bad logic of the case, but the case itself is 
just as you state it. No! You are not good 
enough. What is more and more fatal, you 
never will be. In the full sense o£ the word 
salvation no man ever yet, anywhere on earth 
or in heaven, was ever good enough to gain 
salvation. So let it stand, I cannot dispute 
you. 

But when you said to me, " I'm not good 
enough," you had some belief or idea that some 
one, perhaps some one a great deal better than 
you, could be " good enough " to be a Christian. 
You may even feel that you can and may, some- 
time, get to be good enough yourself. It is this 
notion first that I wish to drive out of your 



" VM NOT GOOD ENOUGH." 65 

mind. Consider! Are not all reason and all 
Scripture against that notion? Jesus nowhere 
teaches us that we can be his disciples on ac- 
count of being good. He often says if we 
have become his disciples we must and shall do 
good works. But you will search the Scriptures 
in vain seeking to find any endorsement of the 
idea that Jesus calls men to him or receives 
them because they are good. And it is easy to 
see that if he were to have disciples at all he 
must have sinners. There are no others. More- 
over, if he requires anything, he requires per- 
fection ; in order to be good enough, you must 
be perfect. But, even then, that does not make 
you a disciple. All that I tried to make plain 
in the second chapter, to which, for the saving 
of time, I wish to refer. 

On the contrary, strange as the statement 
may seem, this very excuse you make is the 
very reason why you can be a Christian and 
ought to be. Before I enlarge upon that, how- 
ever, let me make it as plain as I can that no 
Christian is or ought to be a professor of good- 
ness. This is the unbeliever's standard, but it 
is not the Christian standard. And I suppose 
this is the point at which you have stumbled. 
You have imagined, perhaps, that one becomes 
a Christian by breaking off bad habits, by taking 
up moral and charitable conduct, and practising 



66 " EXCUSE ME." 

good works. It is not so. We are bound to 
do all this, whether we are Christians or not. 
If we become Christians, we shall or should be 
in a condition to avoid evil and do good, which 
we were not in before. But we might do all of 
these things and yet not be Christian. We 
might as yet be able to do none of them and 
yet we might be Christ's disciples. And you 
standing outside the church, have no right to 
measure a Christian by any moral standard 
that you do not now already accept for your- 
self. And if you have set up a standard for 
Christians that you have not attained yourself, 
still you need not be prevented from becoming 
a Christian because you have not reached the 
standard. 

N You would not be so unjust as to doubt that 
many people are Christians who are morally 
no higher than you are? Do you not know 
sincere Christians who, to your view, are not 
so good as you are ? You " don't think much 
of their Christianity," you say. But is not that 
because you first accuse them of professing to 
be good ? If they did profess to be good, and 
if that were their Christianity, then who in all 
the world would be a Christian ? It would be 
a false, hollow profession surely. And you 
think this Christian, Mr. Weakknee, or that 
one, Mrs. Longmouth, actually are false and 



tt n 



VM NOT GOOD ENOUGH." 67 

hollow, because you first assume that they 
profess to be good. But what if they never 
professed any such thing % Is it not you who 
are wide of the mark ? These people, if they 
had the first clear idea about the matter, did 
not become Christian because they had " set 
themselves up " to be good. You have simply 
mistaken their profession. 

Not merely mistaken ! — you have actually 
reversed it and contradicted it. When one 
becomes a Christian he does it, for one thing, 
precisely because he knows that he is not good. 
AH sense of personal worthiness goes out of us 
before we can become Christians. It is pre- 
cisely this certainty I have that I can do no 
good works, that leads me to cast myself on 
Christ. Not because I am good, but because I 
am not, this is the whole motive for seeking a 
Saviour. "When you say, "I am not good 
enough," I answer, " Certainly not." And it 
is further very certain that this is the one 
great, urgent, imperative reason why you should 
seek and accept an atoning Redeemer. Do not 
think you can ever be " good enough." Christ 
has never called anybody who is " good 
enough." There is not a promise in the Bible 
to any one that is " good enough " — not a 
promise of salvation, I mean. 

If now, you will entirely stop thinking about 



68 



" excuse me:' 



your personal good qualities, and the sort of a 
figure you will cut, trying to be good, you may 
see, if you will, that all that is hollow as a 
shell, and that you are a sinner needing to be 
saved. If you will accept Jesus Christ, it is 
not first necessary to be good. You cannot be 
bad enough to be cast out. You cannot be 
good enough to be received. Christ will re- 
ceive you, just now, and just as you are, with- 
out any reference whatever to your goodness, 
and in spite of all your sins. And if you should 
seek him, and become his disciple, you will still 
be the same imperfect moral being you were 
before. That is, you would not have any more 
merit of yourself, nor any more goodness to 
exploit and exhibit than you have now. You 
would indeed feel a thousand times more in- 
tensely, and with far greater apprehension of 
your defects, that you are not good. If your 
Christian profession is sincere, you will see how 
all your moral efforts are puerile, uncertain and 
unworthy of reliance. You will not profess 
them, you will only feel ashamed of them. If 
you can say now, " I'm not good enough," you 
will, much more, say so then. 

Settle it in your mind that you are to stop 
thinking about how good you are. Try to 
understand how had you are. Try to realize 
how Christ can save you. The kingdom of 



" I'M NOT GOOD ENOUGH." 69 

God in all ages and in every place is made up 
of people like you who are not good. How did 
they become Christians ? Surely not by wait- 
ing to become good, not by refusing Christ be- 
cause they were unworthy. Most of them well 
know their own moral defects, the uncertainty 
of their public example, and the fickleness of 
their resolutions. They know these things 
generally speaking much better than the un- 
christian critics do. Nevertheless, somehow 
they dared to say, " We are Christians, we be- 
long to Christ." They said it and still say it 
with boldness and power. How can they ? 
How can you ? 

Because, and only because, of Christ himself. 
The Christian cannot profess goodness but he 
can profess the ONE WHO IS GOOD. I am 
a sinner without any goodness to rely upon, 
but I have a Saviour. I am going to my jour- 
ney's end in heaven, not because I am good, 
but because HE is good. Is not that plain, 
clear, simple ? He saves sinners. He saves 
those who are not good. And when they are 
saved shall they then wickedly and proudly 
begin to say, " See how ' good enough ' I am ? " 
Oh, no ! I am nothing — only a Jost undone 
sinner. I am not saying to this world that I 
am good now that I have found the Christ. I 
am saying " Look at him. See how good he is, 



70 4t EXCUSE ME." 

to pardon, and receive, and give everlasting life, 
and all his promised inheritance to a wretch 
like me. Not good enough. Well is he good 
enough? If you think so, you need not any 
longer go about considering your goodness. 

And lest you should still think, in spite of all 
my attempts to guard against it, that I am 
teaching you that Christianity and goodness are 
separated, I must add another word. I only 
said that goodness is not the thing a Christian 
professes. I only said and keep on saying that 
one never can be Christ's disciple on account of 
being good. But I regard with horror the con- 
dition of mind of the man who says that a Chris- 
tian is not bound to be a good man. Yet I 
usually put it the other way. A sincere disciple 
of Christ will iecome measurably a good man. 
He will never rely on his own goodness, but he 
will get and have goodness. He will always 
know that he is a sinner, and when compared 
with Christ full of dreadful defects, yet as men 
view righteousness he will grow righteous in 
following after Christ. 

And this is at last the answer to your ex- 
cuse : You are not " good enough," by man's 
moral standards. Very well. How do you 
expect to grow better? Let me tell you that 
history — Christendom — is the answer to that 
inquiry. Poor as we are, sinners all undone, 



« I'M NOT GOOD ENOUGH: 1 71 

somehow it has turned out that the righteous- 
ness of mankind has been found in its most 
nearly consummate flowering around the cross 
and religion of Christ. When you come to 
righteousness in him, you probably will not 
think very much about it as a personal merit, 
but you will have it You may not then count 
yourself to be "good enough," but you will 
have a character that you never can find by 
any other experience. Penitence, pardon, and 
a life lived unto him — these will produce the 
only fruits you can ever bear, to the approval 
of our God. 



A pious old age following a youth of vice and a man- 
hood of worldliness and indifference to religion, is not 
the rule, but the exception — and a rare exception. 
There is a close analogy here between the phenomena 
of the material and the spiritual world, conversions in 
old age or advanced manhood being as uncommon as a 
fine afternoon with cloudless skies and a glowing sun- 
set, unless the rain ceases and the weather clears before 
twelve o'clock. — Guthrie. 

Whoever de]ays his repentance, does in effect pawn 
his soul with the devil, and leaves it in his hands, and 
says: " Here, Satan, keep my soul; if I fetch it not 
again by such a day, 'tis thine forever." — Manton. 

The longer the heart and sin converse together, the 
more familiar they will grow ; and them the stronger 
the familiarity, the harder the separation. Does any 
one think he has his heart so in his hand as to say : 
" Thus far will I sin, and there will I leave off ?" Such 
an one shows, indeed, that he neither understands the 
nature of sin nor of his heart. — South. 



(72) 



CHAPTEE VIII. 

" SOME MORE CONVENIENT TIME." 

This seventh time I. listen to the excuse of 
the lost soul. He wants more time. He wants 
some other time. Oh, yes, world-soul, you really 
intend to receive Christ some day ! But not 
now. " There's time — when I get around to 
it. Life is young. I am in the midst of many 
duties. After awhile I will attend to the sav- 
ing of my soul." 

I feel the shadows of unutterable midnight 
drawing down ! Never do I hear this from a 
lost man, that I do not begin to be conscious 
of approaching darkness. The perversities of 
unbelief ! ! Is there any other so stubborn as 
the perversity of delay ? This mote has floated 
out of chaos and is flashing across the daylight 
into eternity — and he talks of having time. 
Seventy years ! A breath, a candle-flame 
passage of a weaver's shuttle, grass that to-day 
is and to-morrow is dead! And here an im- 
mortal soul facing the issues of eternity, that 

must be decided while the day is going by, 

73 



.4 



EXCUSE ME." 



Some time, some time ! Hear him trifle with 
God. And to him the great forever speaks — 
"Hasten, hasten, the day of life goes 
swiftly. " 

Seventy years, did I say ? You are chancing 
a great deal. Man's average does not reach 
forty ! And your life is well begun, is it not ? 
The first fifteen was babyhood. Half of all is 
sleep and sloth. And yet, you go on as if you 
were to live here forever. Preparing for 
everything else, you never prepare to die. 

Yet, when you^are reminded that death must 
come, and that you have no standing with 
God, you admit it all — but there's time 
enough. Some more convenient time ! ! What 
awaits an unsaved man who dies in his sins ? 
Does that question interest you? You have 
some opinion upon it, haven't you ? And when 
the hour comes to die, vou do not w T ish to die 
with any chance untried. The barest possi- 
bility that irrecoverable lapse into a lost estate 
is the doom of an unsaved man, is worth, think- 
ing about. You would shrink with untold 
horror from the thought of going out of life 
unsaved. If there is any ground of assurance 
for man hereafter, you do not intend to miss it 
at last. If there is any ground to fear that the 
future is black and hopeless for a man who dies 
in his sins, that fate you do not mean to risk. 



u 



SOME MORE CONVENIENT TIME.'" 75 



And you are not able, nor are you disposed 
to deny that the Scriptures are true in their 
warnings and prophecies of future punishment. 
On the whole, you assent to them. Or, at the 
farthest, if you do not positively believe them, 
you do not intend to leave their warnings un- 
heeded. 

But are you so sure of your life then ? Even 
if we admit that a few years hence might be a 
convenient time — who has guaranteed you a 
few more years ? I saw a red-cheeked young 
man come out from a hotel, whistling, and 
walk up the avenue. A heavy stone crashed 
down from a roof and struck him fairly on the 
head. In five minutes he was dead. In his 
hand he carried an application for life-insurance, 
bearing a physician's certificate, in which it 
appeared that he was twenty-six years old and 
physically perfect. A bridegroom, going to his 
wedding, paused in a shed to evade the rain. 
The shed was smitten by lightning, and they 
buried his body in the wedding garments. 
Men are killed by swallowing corks, or orange 
seeds, by the scratch of a rabbit's paw, by 
slipping on a lemon-skin. You need not fore- 
cast the chances of a railway horror, a wreck 
at sea, an explosion in the mine, a Johnstown 
flood. Death has a million forms. And you 
walk about in the midst of chances, which, if 



76 " EXCUSE ME." 

•m 

you knew them all, you would count battle 
fields no horror in comparison. And yet — you 
delay. 

You must see, I suppose, that it is taking 
great risk of dying unsaved when, for a single 
day, a man lives unsaved. But you can some- 
what better estimate that risk when I begin 
to ask what you mean by a more convenient 
time. I suspect you mean merely some time. 
You do not really mean a time, do you ? You 
mean to be a Christian after awhile. Very 
well — when? Have von then set the time? 
" On such a day, a month hence, I will give 
my heart to the Saviour ? " When you attend 
to that question, and try to answer it, you will 
see the nature of your excuse. No ! You do 
not mean to take a time, you only vaguely 
think you will not do it now. And that means 
that you have not made up your mind to do it. 
You only hope that, some time, you may 
perhaps make up your mind. And so these 
rapid days go by with all their risks. . 

It is getting late, my friend ! 

How long have you been considering the 
question of being a Christian ? You have de- 
layed, and dallied, and deferred, now this long 
time. Look back and say if times are getting 
any more " convenient," as you go on. Really 
you do not seem to be any nearer than you 



" SOME MORE CONVENIENT TIME.' 1 77 

were last year. Life grows busier and more 
worldly. The urgency on your conscience is 
not as keen as it once was. No, vou haven't 
given up the idea of being saved, but you know 
very well that if you begin now it will cost a 
great deal more than it would have cost when 
first God's Spirit began to move upon you. 
Those world associations have strengthened. 
It is not so easy to cultivate new tastes for 
Christian things. The Bible is neglected more, 
or altogether. You are not praying any more. 
The skepticism of mere worldly education is 
making it increasingly difficult for you to 
believe with any positiveness the realities of 
the Christian faith. Delay gives excuse for 
more delay. You are hardening to the habit 
of putting Christ off. 

As sure as Christ is true, and human nature 
mobile, that hardening will increase. Is it too 
late to rouse you ? I hope not. But it is one 
of the sad, inexorable certainties, that our souls 
cannot stand still. If we go not with Christ 
we must drift away from him. For this reason, 
a future time for the sinner never can be a 
better time — it must always be a worse time. 
Do not think you can find a more convenient 
time. There is no such time. In all the days 
of your life and of eternity there never will be 
any such time. Every hour and day that 



78 " EXCUSE me:' 

Christ is put off increases the probabilities that 
you will never accept him. When doubts 
begin, they grow until they become denials. 
When the associations of the world are once 
fixed, every hour given to them increases their 
power. They bind you hand and foot. They 
make it difficult or impossible at last to abandon 
them. The threads of bondage are finer than 
gauze, but they are constituted of a million 
motives, experiences, feelings, and impressions, 
that, taken together, become a bent or tendency 
that carries you on irresistibly, away from 
God. 

Are you wiser and stronger than universal 
human nature ? You think you can come back 
to a religious life when you get ready — and 
you think you can get ready. But in every one 
hundred Christians over ninety became Chris- 
tians before they were forty years old. The 
great majority accept Christ before they are 
twenty-five. You are not so different from 
others. It will not help us to imagine that 
you can accept Christ when you are old — or 
at any future time this side of the grave. The 
great overwhelming probabilities are that if you 
go on until you are forty years old, you will 
go on thence to death, unsaved. " Some more 
convenient time," if you keep on saying it much 
longer, means NEYER, never, forever ! 



44 SOME MORE CONVENIENT TIME." 79 

Are not men saved on the death-bed ? was 
not the thief saved on his cross ? Let us not 
doubt it. But the worst chance of all for a 
man to receive Christ is the deathbed. Let us 
assume that you will have a deathbed. Who 
rules there ? The physician. Often the pain 
of sickness is mercifully deadened with drugs. 
At best the spiritual faculties, with a man who 
all his life has known no Christ, are at a feeble 
ebb. How shall you effectually call on the 
Christ whom in life, and all life through, you 
have neglected ? It is not easy to take on sud- 
denly a faith that shall reverse, once for all, a 
whole lifetime of indifference and worldliness. 
If you think at all in that last mortal hour, will 
you not think vainly of a wasted life, spent, so 
far as religion is concerned, in prating about a 
more convenient time ? I do not teach that it 
is enough to call on God in the hour of your 
fear and distress. There must be faith in our 
call. How much are you likely to have — you 
who have had a thousand invitations and have 
spurned them, you who knew you ought to ac- 
cept a Saviour, and have put him away again 
and again ? Your dying hed ! It were better 
to do a little effective thinking about it now, I 
cannot assure you that you shall be able to re- 
pent when that dread hour has come. 

I really suppose I have touched the only 



80 " EXCUSE me:' 

vitally important consideration when I re- 
minded you of death. You may call me a 
gloomy alarmist if you choose. Nevertheless 
you had better understand that we are soon to 
die, and that it will not give us peace to feel 
that we are dying without Christ. You may 
be moved somewhat, however, by considering 
the loss to you for the life that now is. Is it 
not of some value to live as a Christian ? 
Christ postponed, put away, neglected — is it 
not the same as to say that you are missing the 
greatest blessings of life ? If, indeed, you should 
by and by seek him and find him, you cannot 
recover the lost ground. You will be less likely 
to find a Christian life that is natural and free. 
You will have so much to unlearn. Every day 
you put Christ off increases the labor of finding 
the way back to his near acquaintance. 

Your situation as an inquirer is of greater 
concern to me because of your intelligence 
about the matter. You know what you ought 
to do, and that you ought to do it now. For 
that reason your condemnation is greater. Bet- 
ter, by far, 1 think, that we never heard of 
Christ, than that we should come to the day 
when we realize that we have rejected him ir- 
redeemably. Oh, to have let the joy of God's 
heaven slip out of our grasp ! We might have 
had it. And now they are shutting up the gates. 



" SOME MORE CONVENIENT TIME." 81 

It is twilight on the hill-slopes, and we must 
turn away and walk forever in the valleys out- 
side. If Christ had never spoken ! If his voice 
that I did not obey would cease to haunt me ! 
O Soul ! It is not vet too late. There is a 
convenient time. NOW. 



If God show mercy to thousands, labor to know that 
this mercy is for you. A man that was ready to drown 
saw a rainbow, saith he, "What am I better though 
God will not drown the world if I drown." So, what 
are we better, that God is merciful, if we perish ? Let 
us labor to know God's special mercy to us. — Watson. 

Woful experience teacheth us there are some no 
sun will tan ; they keep their own complexion under 
the most shining and burning light of the gospel. 

— Gurnall. 

Let it never be disguised from us that our salvation 
lies in finding God. — Bushnell. 



(82) 



CHAPTEE IX. 



" GOD IS LOVE I I NEED NOT FEAR." 



There is a great deal of Jim Bludso theology 
in this world. Colonel John Hay gets up a 
gospel for Jim that turns out to be prevalent 
and typical. 

" He loudly cussed and swore, 

I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank 
'Till the last galoot's ashore." 

And so he did. Having died at his post, the 
poet goes on to make his eschatology. 

" An' Christ ain't a goin' 'ter be too hard 
On a man that died for men." 

Now I am not desirous to consign Jim 
Bludso to perdition. I only say that we can't 
be wise above what is written. The New 
Testament does not assure us that a man can 
be saved by holding " her nozzle agin the bank." 
It would be somewhat better to get at the 
way Christ feels towards sinners by hearing 
what he says himself. 

oo 



84 "EXCUSE ME." 

"God is love." Yes, there is no greater 
truth than this. But you, a lost soul, come 
forward and urge that as a reason why you do 
not love him supremely : " I need not take 
any particular step to become a child of God, 
because he loves me ! It will all be well with 
me, since God is love ! " When I urge you to 
give God your heart and believe in the Son 
whom he hath sent, you turn and tell me that 
God loves you and that is enough. 

But it is not enough. 

It is strange that any one should argue that 
God's love for us is an exemption to us from 
loving God. And it is strange that any one can 
believe that a man can be saved without su- 
premely loving God. For what is salvation in its 
best and highest sense but precisely and exactly 
the birth in us of a supreme love for God who 
first loved us ? And if that be so, God's love 
for you, if it could be infinitely multiplied, could 
not take a single step towards saving you until 
you also love God. 

The most depraved of lost men will tell you 
that God is love. It is in itself of no value 
whatever to know that fact. It must be that 
the arch-fiend knows it, and doubtless is the 
more a fiend because he does. And, in your 
own case, it is plain that the knowledge, as you 
use it, endangers your salvation, because you 



" GOD IS LOVE : I NEED NOT FEAB." 85 

make it an excuse for not doing the one need- 
ful thing. You set up a theology of your own, 
and begin to say, " God will save me because God 
is love. I need not take any trouble to repent 
and believe." And so you neglect the only way 
there is to make God's love efficacious in your 
redemption. A man sitting in a darkened 
house tells me he is going to have light because 
he knows there is a sun outside that gives 
light. But he doesn't open the windows. And 
if he doesn't open them, when do you think he 
will have light ? But his argument is as good 
as yours. The Sun of Righteousness, incarnate 
love of God, may shine indeed and shine for- 
ever, but not on you. You sit down and say, 
"I need not trouble to open the windows. 
The sun gives light." 

I do not wish to reason with you as if I 
thought you a Universalist. I assume that you 
are not. This book is not intended for the 
conversion of Universalists — though I wish it 
might convert some of them. But you believe 
there are some who will fall short of salvation. 
Jim Bludso, however, you think ought to be 
saved. The love of God will avail for men 
who are virtuous or heroic. And you do not 
feel that you deserve to be lost, perhaps. If 
God is really love, he will save me somehow, 
though some depraved people may not be 



86 " EXCUSE me:' 

saved. And then you cast up in your mind 
the heroes and scholars and philanthropists, and 
remember the infidel's taunt that our theology 
has peopled perdition with the best men of all 
ages. You remember the boast that a man 
would find much better company in hell if the 
theologies are true. And you do not believe 
they are lost — all these great and good men 
who did not make any known profession of 
Christ. And you do think by some similar 
reasoning you need not fear you will be lost. 

"Well, to begin with, neither you nor I, nor 
any one on earth knows that these great men 
were saved. Put the matter at its very best, 
and still we may well fear that some of them 
were not. God surely loved the men of great 
repute as much as he loves you. 

But if they died without the availing atone- 
ment of Christ, we have no ground for saying 
that they are in heaven. Suppose we lelieve 
that they are, even so we cannot be sure. 
Genius in this world is often perverted, and 
great men are not always God's men, and their 
work often fails. They themselves fail. God 
hath not chosen the great and mighty heirs of 
his kingdom — think of it however you will. 
And there is no ground of salvation for the 
great one whit different from that on which 
the thief on the cross was saved. And we can 



44 GOB IS LOVE : I NEED NOT FEAKr 87 

only say, if the great and wise men of the past 
were saved, it was not because they were great 
and wise, but because they were born again. 

But all this reasoning about God's love has 
obscured the case a little. After all, unless 
you are a Universalist, you are not, evidently 
relying on God's love, but on your own virtue. 
You are too good to be lost. These great and 
good men you talk about were too good to be 
lost. Jim Bludso is to be saved, after all, not 
because God loves us, but because he held the 
boat against the shore and perished at his post. 
Not God's love, but God's love to virtuous people 
like yourself is what you are pleading. " God 
is love, and as I try to do fairly well, it cannot 
be he will permit me to be lost." And so, in 
order not to be a Universalist, you have to say 
that God's love will save the moderately good 
people like yourself, though it does not avail 
with everybody. And that is the kind of dread- 
ful pharisaisms that your excuse really contains. 
You begin by praising God's love, but you 
really meant to show how sure it is that God 
loves you, because you think you deserve it. 

But we have now only reverted to that old, 
subtle, ubiquitous, recurring devil of self -right- 
eousness that several times in these pages we 
have tried to drive out. And again I must say 
that God does not love you, nor will he save 



88 " EXCUSE me:' 

you on account of your moral standing. 
I do not know how much of real faith in God 
Jim Bludso had when he went to death at his 
post. But I know that we have no reason for 
thinking Christ will save his soul because he 
did what his duty was. The love of God is not 
something that loves merely what is lovable. 
It was made known to us when " in due time 
Christ died for the ungodly" " While we 
were yet sinners, Christ died for us." 

And you may be as virtuous as you can, you 
have no merit in it either to claim or to draw 
out God's love. 

But no man was ever lost, if God's love, and 
that alone, is enough. If you need not fear, 
and need not repent and believe, because God 
is love ; then no one need fear, believe, or re- 
pent. But if some men have been lost forever, 
it was, of course, in spite of the fact that God 
loved them. God loves everyone. God loved 
Judas, and the love of Christ held him as long 
as it could. Christ loved the Pharisees whom 
he called vipers and children of the devil. But 
did his love save them ? And I believe that 
the tortures of the outer darkness, where the 
damned forever dwell, largely consist in the 
realization that God and his love have been 
lost. How comes any one to be in perdition, if 
God's love alone saves us ? And if some have 



" GOD IS LOVE : I NEED NOT FEAR." 89 

been lost, though God is love, then you have 
no assurance of being saved, though God is 
love. " So we see that they could not enter in 
because of unbelief." " Let us therefore fear, 
lest, a promise being left us of entering into 
his rest, any of you should seem to come short 
of it." 

But I have thus far put your excuse at its 
best. Are you not continuing in sin, because 
you believe God is love ? I urge you to believe 
on Christ and to love God supremely, but you 
will not do it. And you say you need not do it ? 
Why ? Because " God is love." Thus you take 
God's holy love for you and pervert it into a 
reason for not loving him in return. And I 
wish to say very plainly that this is the worst 
sin there is. It is mockery of divine love. It 
is blasphemy against God. You do not mean 
it so, you have deceived yourself so long talk- 
ing about the love of God you think there is 
really great credit in pleading it. And you 
have somehow thought it was enough. But it 
prevents you from being saved. It is the very 
thing that, if you are lost, will arm eternity 
with its unspeakable sting. God who loves 
you and wishes to save you is actually prevented 
by this false view of yours about his love. 

It is true that God's love is the power by 
which you must be saved. But this power has 



90 " EXCUSE ME." 

a chosen way. It does not save anyhow, but 
somehow. As light gets into your room when 
you open your blinds, so God's love comes in to 
benefit you when you open the heart and soul. 
Love cannot work to save you, unless you take 
and fulfill its conditions*, any more than cold 
fuel and cold water can make steam, or steam 
make an engine go without passing into the 
piston-box. You might believe all your life 
that God is love, and be no better for it ; but 
when, in God's appointed way, you begin to re- 
ceive God's love, and to love him, its power is 
then applied to you. Now God, who loves us, 
has the right to apply his love under such con- 
ditions as he chooses to make. But the condi- 
tions are not of an arbitrary kind. We are not 
saved, and cannot be saved, until we love God, 
and love him supremely. Love in us is the 
chief thing, as I have before said, that consti- 
tutes a Christian life. To talk about being 
saved, while we do not love God supremely, 
is to talk mere absurdity. 

Without any question, God teaches us in his 
Word that we must repent and believe, in 
order to be saved. These are conditions on 
which God's love can be received. When you 
sit down and say, " I need not repent and be- 
lieve, because God is love," you have simply 
rejected that love. Having rejected it, it does 



" GOD IS LOVE : I NEED NOT FEAR." 91 

not apply. You cannot be saved. And then 
it will not be of much importance to you that 
God is love. It is only a theoretical saying of 
yours, so long as you do not love him. You 
can rote it over, as you would say that you be- 
lieve summer is coming. If you live in a cave, 
under the ground, summer will not help you. 
Only those who love God really know that God 
is love. With you, his love is only a vague 
thought of refuge to one who has sought no 
refuge. 

God is love ! What does that mean ? Oh, thou 
cold, dead excuser of thyself ! How slothf ully 
and wickedly hast thou talked of love ! Let us 
look at love. Let us see love in its divine 
agony. There is blackness on the dreadful 
hill ; out of it a fainting voice that cries : " My 
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " — a 
word of universal pathos that makes the world 
weep, "Father, forgive them." There were 
thorns for love's lacerated brow, nails for love's 
pierced hands and feet, a Roman spear for 
love's riven side. Hear the mob shouting 
around the accursed tree. At the foot of that 
cross brutal guards fling dice for the garments 
of God. And the very earth trembles and 
shudders. Out of the rocky hillside graves the 
gaunt and ghostly dead stalk forth to hear the 
dying groans of crucified love. Look on him. 



92 "EXCUSE ME." 

You think God is love. Here is the love. On 
that uplifted cross it was slain amidst the 
groanings of the world to reveal itself for you. 
And you! You have merely looked on. 
You love him not at all. May God show 
you the transcendent spectacle in the lightning 
of some midnight hour, that you, beholding the 
patient face of Christ on his cross, may find 
your breaking heart a-crying in its remorse and 
penitence, " My Lord and my God." 



When a clock is out of order we take it to pieces and 
search where the fault lies. . . Our hearts are every day 
out of order, our work must be to take them to pieces 
by examination, and see where the great fault is. 

— Swinnock. 

In truth, the great want of the unconverted is the 
absence of the Spirit of God from his soul. — Kyle. 

We must not trifle with ourselves. This is our great 
danger — not that we cheat others, but that we cheat 
our own souls out of their best possessions. 

—A. D. Mayo. 



(94) 



CHAPTER X. 

THE REAL REASON. 

Excuses! How interminable and various 

thev are ! Nor have I believed that I could at- 

t/ 

tend to them all in this little book. Somewhat 
further we might follow the persistent sinuosi- 
ties of unbelief, and still remain on familiar 
ground. Yet, I am fairly certain that the 
most important and most dangerous of the 
" reasons that ruin you " have been consid- 
ered in the foregoing chapters. And I trust 
the reader has seen how useless and incon- 
sequential these excuses are. Can we not con- 
clude them as we began them, with the 
conviction that there is no good reason any- 
where, for anybody, that prevents one from 
accepting Jesus Christ ? Are not the excuses 
men urge mostly vain and insincere ? Back of 
them all there must be some final, fatal, subtle 
reason, when men, being invited, refuse the 
Lord Jesus Christ. These excuses may be 
urged, but, under pressure of every earnest 
argument, they go down like straw. And when 



96 "EXCUSE ME." 

they are all laid, even so, men still remain un- 
saved. Yes, they will revert to the old ex- 
cuses, even after they clearly see that they are 
worthless. And they will keep on shifting 
from one excuse to another wnenever they are 
pressed by God's Spirit, and by the work of 
the church, to surrender themselves to God. 

If you are not a Christian, surely it is not 
because of any of these excuses that I have at- 
tempted to demolish. Not one of them can 
stand. You confess yourself that they are 
vain. Every honest soul will confess that not 
one of them is sufficient to prevent his being a 
Christian, if the mind were once reallv made 
up. Then what is the matter ? Why are you 
not a Christian ? Why will you not now take 
Christ and settle the question ? This, then, I 
say, by way of answer, it is because you will 
not. Come back to it from anv direction, 
evade it a million times, at last it all comes 
down to this : " Ye will not have eternal 
life." The one final, insoluble, fatal reason 
why you are unsaved is YOURSELF. 

I am interested in your flimsy excuses only 
because I am so intensely interested in you. 
And I confess that I do not understand you. 
It is so incredible that a soul should stand 
where you do. Your attitude is against all 
reason. The reasons and the interests are all 



THE REAL REASON. 97 

on the other side. You have all the light 
there is, or at the worst you know where to go 
for all the light you need. The Bible is on 
your table. The word is preached where you 
can hear it often. The Sunday-school and the 
Endeavor Society have -labored for your soul 
together. You believe in heaven, you believe 
in hell. Everything around you is favorable 
to your salvation. Your own hopes and fears 
still incite or trouble you. And you know 
that life and opportunity are swiftly passing 
by. What is the matter? Surely it is just 
YOUKSELF. 

I will admit that the gospel is very im- 
perfectly preached. It cannot be denied that 
preachers and teachers are very imperfect 
guides. But you will not honestly say they 
are to blame. You know in your heart that in 
the poorest sermon you ever heard there w r as 
truth enough to save you, if you had acted 
upon it. There has scarcely been a day of 
your life when you failed to hear truth enough, 
if you had acted upon it, to lead you to heaven. 
And a long time ago I was done excusing 
unsaved men on the ground that the gospel is 
administered imperfectly. I know it is the 
fashion somewhat in these days to impeach the 
church, because it is so slow to save the world. 
But you yourself are the evidence that the task 



98 . u EXCUSE ME." 

is not so easy as some think. And there are . 
countless people for whom all has been done 
that we could reasonably expect, and still they 
are not Christians. No, I do not believe that 
if you read this little book and then shall be 
lost, that your blood can be laid upon my 
head ; no, nor upon the church, the preacher, 
the means of grace that you have had offered 
to you and have not received. 

The question of your condition you ought to 
face. If you are not saved, it is the fault of no 
one but only yourself. At God's judgment 
seat, you cannot plead these excuses. You 
cannot lay your fate upon others. Christ has 
spoken to you, and you must answer. 

The first element of your rejection of Christ 
is your pride. You will not give up and confess 
him before men. In the deep recesses of y our 
heart you hold a citadel that you will not sur- 
render. Pride keeps you back. 

There is, secondly, without doubt a con- 
sciousness of secret sin there that vou will not 
cast out. The chief reason why men give so 
many vain excuses is to be found in this 
consciousness. Men do not like to give the 
real reason. You are a sinner and you can't 
give up your sin. Sin keeps you back. 

And, in the third place, there lies in your 
nature, somewhere, as in mine and every man's, 



THE REAL REASON. 99 

a native perversity of resistance that, without 
reason and against reason, holds out against 
all appeals. You do not yourself know how 
to explain that. It is in us all. 

Nevertheless, God has made you free and 
responsible. You have the power, with God's 
offered help, to break the back of pride. You 
have the power to say to your sin : " I hate 
you and I will not parley with you." And 
you are able to pierce that strange perversity 
and slay it. And these things God requires 
you to do. That is not salvation, but you must 
do it in order to salvation — must and can. If 
you do not, it is your own refusal, and God 
holds you responsible. You cannot evade that 
requirement by making excuses. You are able 
to be saved, to be saved now, and you know 
that you are able. Nothing is in the way. 
You, and you alone, prevent. If you refuse 
to exercise your will, to act, to accept Christ 
and believe on him, that is a final and fatal 
reason, and your ruin is charged in its dreadful 
potencies. 

This means that you are lost, because you do 
not will to be saved. You talk about it, vou 
excuse yourself, you give reasons enough, but 
you do not settle the question. I do not mean 
to teach that a man is saved by the power 
of his will. I mean that he must exercise his 



100 "EXCUSE ME." 

will before he can be saved, and in order to be 
saved, by the grace of God. Acceptance of 
Christ is a question to be decided, and you de- 
cide it by the will. You choose Christ. But re- 
jection of him is also a decision. It may not be 
made in so definite a fashion, but if you do not 
choose Christ you reject him, and do it wilfully. 
Your will has no power to save you and no 
power to send you to perdition, but you can 
neither be saved nor lost except as you exercise 
the will. You cannot deny that you have had 
the opportunity to choose Christ. But you did 
not choose him. Your will did not fix on 
him and surrender to him. This is the reason 
that ruins you. 

This could not be otherwise if God is to have 
a heaven at all. I do not wish to mystify you 
with metaphysics. And yet the best service 
any man can receive who is lost is to make him 
see how absolutely he is himself to blame. He 
will not begin to act unless he settles it once 
for all that his salvation all depends on his own 
choice. Now, it ought to be apparent to you 
that if we love God at all, it must be by our own 
free choice. Love cannot be constrained. If 
you should think of being forced to love, you 
would at once see that the exercise of force 
destroys love. It is no longer love, because it 
is «no longer free. If, therefore, salvation 



THE REAL REASON. 101 

must largely consist in loving God supremely, 
we must do this loving ourselves, without any 
constraint. That is, we must choose to love 
God. And having a choice, of course we can 
choose to refrain from loving ; we can choose 
even to hate him. 

If God should ask us to do some hard thing 
that did not depend upon our will, but only 
upon our circumstances, we could justly excuse 
ourselves. And this consideration justifies the 
actual requirement. God asks something we 
can do of ourselves. Every creature whom 
Christ died to redeem has a free will of his own. 
If God asks us to exercise our will, he asks 
something that all men everywhere can do. 
And so he has left all men without excuse. If 
you dp not choose to love God there is nothing 
to compel you. You can go on unloving and 
rejecting, because you are free. But you 
ought to understand clearly that this is your 
trouble, and not any of these vain excuses that 
you make. 

Ruins you? Yes — because the will itself 
gets its direction fixed some time. The things 
we will not choose, by and by, morally speak- 
ing, we cannot choose. Not that any other or 
outside force will ever hinder us from loving 
God, but the time will come when choices have 
been made and we have lost the power to 



102 "EXCUSE ME." 

reverse them. You are familiar with this 
dreadful tendency and bondage of ethical habit. 
The further we go, the faster we go. To-day it 
may be it is not too late to love God supremely. 
But if you choose to love self and sin instead, 
that choice sets in motion all your powers in 
the service of self and sin. You grow strong 
in selfishness and sinfulness, and you grow weak 
in the power to choose God and holiness. I 
need not illustrate that truth. You know it 
in your own experience. You observe it in all 
the actions and habits of men. And it consti- 
tutes the tremendous urgency of God's appeal 
to you when he says to your soul, " Choose ye 
this day whom ye will serve." 

I do not know how far a man can go and 
still be able to return. But it is axiomatic that 
you cannot go both ways at the same time. It 
is the sad truth that makes the shuddering evil 
of human life, that a man can go too far. 
Safety lies this side of the point where choice 
ceases to be probable. Yes, " while the lamp 
holds out to burn, the vilest sinner may return." 
We base all our efforts on that. But we see 
that they do not always return. They go on. 
Momentum cannot be reversed. The plea that 
once touched and almost melted them, to-dav 
they hear indifferently, and to-morrow they 
will not hear it at all. Angels may sing, and 



THE REAL REASON. 103 

fill heaven and earth with the sound, but there 
are some who never will hear them again. 

But you can still melt and long and hope. 
Can you not also will f The morning hour 
may be gone, but there is time still. And it is 
fleeing past you like shadows on the canvas of 
a pantomime. " To-day if ye will hear his 
voice, harden not your heart." Believe me, you, 
and you alone, can settle this matter. If you 
miss heaven at last, you and you alone, among 
all the creatures of the outer darkness w T ill be 
to blame. And in that day the sting of your 
fate will be the knowing that you alone are to 
blame. 



Who is wiser for the wisdom of the hour ? 
The good old paths are good enough for me. 
The fathers walked to heaven in them, and we 
By following meekly where they trod, may reach 
The home they found. There will be mysteries, 
Let those who like bother their head with them. 

— Bitter Sweet. 

They (the Scriptures) are sufficiently plain in all things 
necessary to faith , . . otherwise they could not be 
useful, for a rule that is not plain to us in those things 
in which it is necessary for us to be directed by it, is of 
no use to us ... and it is every man's fault if he be 
ignorant of anything necessary for him to believe or do 
in order to his eternal happiness. — Tillotson. 



(104) 



CHAPTEE XL 

THE WAY IS PLAIN. 

It is the immediate duty of every soul that 
has ever heard of Jesus Christ to accept him 
and become a Christian. It is, however, to be 
admitted that there is much chance for error, 
and confusion. It is a very sad reflection upon 
Christian teaching that any one should honestly 
be confused in finding the way into a Christian 
life. Yet such is the vagueness and complexity 
of much of our teaching, that many have come 
to think that entrance upon a Christian life is 
difficult, and hard to be accomplished. Some- 
what of this has come from the confusing of 
Christian experience after one has become a 
Christian, with the requirements in order to 
become one. Much more has the way been 
made obscure by not attending to the source 
of our knowledge, the Word of God. "We are 
so prone to tell how we feel and how we must 
feel, how we think and what our opinions are ; 
and every different man has a different way 

of describing his feelings and expressing his 

105 



106 "EXCUSE ME." 

thoughts ; and the result of it all seems to a . 
thoughtful inquirer like a vast contradictory 
Babel of tongues. He knows not how to 
begin. 

But let us be sure that there is, nevertheless, 
some plain and simple way of becoming a 
Christian. There i*- y and no one can mistake 
it, unless he does so wilfully, after once he has 
the clue. Should we not at once say that if 
God really wants me to be saved he will show 
me how to be saved ? Nay, more, he will in a 
matter so important, make the case very plain. 
He will not allow me to risk my eternity in a 
doubtful effort to find out some obscure and 
difficult path. Salvation is not first and most 
for wise and able folks. It must be plain enough 
for the simple and ignorant. " A wayfaring 
man, though a fool," must be able to find out 
easily how to be saved. If Christianity is to 
be a universal religion, man's acceptance of it 
must be free from obstacles. It must not be 
a step shrouded with mysteries and vexed with 
perplexities. It must not be a thing requiring 
long study, and deep thought, and extensive 
preparation. And I say very boldly that the 
way of salvation is plain, that you need not 
miss it, that no one need miss it. 

But if one does miss it, it must be either 
because he does not care much about it, or be- 



THE WAY IS PLAIN. 107 

cause he seeks it in the wrong place or way. 
For while the way is plain and simple, I do not 
teach that it is easy, with human pride and sin, 
actually to become a Christian. If one wishes 
to be a Christian he must begin by desiring 
this more than he desires anything else what- 
ever. The way may be perfectly plain, but 
the soul must intensely desire and supremely 
intend to find and walk in it. God does not 
show the wav to those who do not seek it. We 
are even told that we must agonize to enter 
the strait gate. But that does not mean that 
the way is difficult to find, but only that it is 
hard for our pride and sin to choose it when 
it is found. The trouble with most of us is 
not that we cannot find the way, but that we 
will not choose it, because of our pride and sin. 

But not only must you desire to find Christ 
more than you desire anything else, but you 
must seek the wav of salvation where it is to 
be found. Where is that? Of course in the 
Word of God. 

Now, that direction is not so simple and stale 
as it seems. It has in it the secret of the whole 
matter. And it is the most important thing to 
be said. You would understand that, if you 
had the experience of a Christian worker trying 
to lead souls to Christ. For you would find, 
strangely enough, that tfyey go everywhere else 



108 " EXCUSE me:' 

to find the way of salvation, except the one 
only place where it is revealed. No, that state- 
ment isn't an atom too strong. That is the 
observation of every worker who has dealt with 
inquirers. And the chances are that you, my 
friend, are in the same case. You do not know 
what salvation is nor how to come by it. Such, 
at least, is the state of many whom I meet. 

Some of these excuses that I have tried to 
answer show the confusion of mind that exists 
about the way of salvation. Some are looking 
to have a " change of heart," like that of their 
Christian friends. Others are thinking about 
a reform of conduct, good resolutions, the 
breaking off of bad habits. Others still are 
talking about joining the church, as if that were 
the question. This man tries to study out a 
theology, and that one thinks he ought to have 
a great amount of sorrow and repentance. 
And now, to uncounted numbers of these 
people it never occurs to go to the Book and 
find out. Their own notions, the experiences, 
opinions, hobbies, and dogmas of others, feel- 
ings, hopes, fears, doubts — all these you con- 
sult and think about. And very likely, at last, 
you do one of two things, either you follow one 
or the other of these things that you have 
picked up in such ways, or you see the babel 
they make and sit down in despair, thinking 



THE WAY IS PLAIN. 109 

the way is too confused to leave you certain of 
anything. 

But all this while, why does it not occur to 
you that there is, after all, only one way to 
know how to be saved? If your neighbor 
really is right about it, and has learned the 
way, he must have found it somewhere. He 
didn't invent it. It did not grow up from the 
ground or leap into the thoughts out of space. 
And if he is wrong there must be a way to 
correct his error. Why should any one halt 
and dally with a thousand entirely unauthor- 
ized teachings, when he must know that all the 
truth they have must come from the same 
place, to which you can go any hour and find 
it for yourself? 

And this false and unnecessary search for 
Christ's way of salvation is the more to be 
condemned when we see the wrecks it makes. 
On the one side, as I have said, it often pre- 
vents men from finding the true way. But on 
the other, how many have taken a false start 
by mistaking for Christianity that which was 
only a fragment of it, or was not Christianity 
at all, or was not that item of Christian life for 
which they were seeking, and which alone they 
needed at that time ! And having followed 
somebody's advice, this soul tries to be a Chris- 
tian on the basis of somebody's advice. He 



110 "EXCUSE ME." 

tries to follow somebody's else experience. He 
gets hold of a traditional or atmospheric ex- 
perience, that never was meant to fit him, and 
has no great value with anybody. When it 
fails, and he finds he has no real religion, he 
thinks Christianity has failed. Or, if he keeps 
it up, and goes on living by the tradition, his 
experience all the way through is fictitious and 
his example vicious. The church and the 
world is full of religious wrecks that became 
wrecks because at the beginning they tried 
man's way and not God's way. And it is not 
too much to say that our churches are uncon- 
sciously the centers of teaching and preaching 
to the unconverted of things not in the Bible 
at all, or not intended to be applied to inquirers. 
I have found a great deal of incredulity, 
moreover, concerning the Bible teaching. When 
a person has for a long time heard this or that 
experience described as conversion, it is difficult 
to reshape the conception, and take the easy 
and simple statements of God's Word. If the 
inquirer has come to have a long intrenched 
notion, for instance, that he must think the 
matter over a long time, he thinks there must 
be some mistake when we show him the 
Scriptures, and how they demand him to act 
now, and require no long reasoning at all about 
the matter. So when he has settled it by some 



THE WAY IS PLAIN. Ill 

traditions of his own, or the teachings of others, 
that he must wait to feel somehow, he cannot 
believe that God only requires him at once to 
go about the doing of something. And so, 
while the way is plain and simple, thousands 
will not understand that it is so, because they 
have derived their ideas of conversion and re- 
generation from sources entirely outside God's 
Word. They have accepted notions that the 
Word does not teach and are misled by them. 

But, surely, you will agree with me that, if 
we are ever to know what religion is, we can 
know onlv from the Bible, or from those w r ho 
teach the Bible. If it were not for this 
Book, we should have no Christian religion (hu- 
manly speaking). It is here we learn of Christ 
and his work, and not anywhere else. If we 
want to know just what he does require, why 
not go to this Book and find out ? And if 
God wants a man, wants yo%i to be converted, 
if he has said so anywhere, it is here. No one 
else professes to speak for God. No other 
book professes to reveal God's will to us. If 
you really want to settle the question, go to the 
Bible, and go feeling sure that if God wants 
you to be saved, he will tell yon and tell you 
very plainly ', what you must do and how to 
do it. 

If any one will do this, I will promise him 



112 ''EXCUSE ME.' 1 

that he will certainly find three things : First, 
that God wants him to be saved. Second, that 
God has made provisions to save him, and, 
Third, that in the Book he has made those 
provisions very simply and clearly known, so 
that he will see that he can be saved, and know 
just how to bring it about. 

And, in making this promise, I am not merely 
staking upon it my own repute and truthful- 
ness, I am putting on a fair and proper trial 
the Bible itself, and the very goodness of God. 
For if God did not reveal these three things, 
and if the Bible did not contain them, then we 
would not be bound to love God, nor receive 
the Bible. If God is love, then he wants vou 
to be saved. If he wants you to be saved, he 
must have made the necessary provisions, but 
if you have any part in your own salvation then 
any book that is properly called The Bible will 
of course tell you what to do and how to do it. 

And so, in the next chapter, I propose to 
show you just what that way is in the Bible, 
and how plain and simple God has made it. I 
ask you to read. 



He who is born of God hath a new heart. The strings 
of the viol may be the same, but the tune is altered. 

—Watson. 

When a man changes from the power of supreme 
selfishness to the power of supreme love, from the ser- 
vice of the world to the service of God, the change is 
instantaneous, though the causes leading to it are 
gradual. — Beecher. 

There is a way of salvation, and thou must trust 
Christ or perish. If you reject the compass and the 
pole-star you will not get to your journey's end. If a 
man will not do the thing that is necessary to a certain 
end, I do not see how he can expect to gain that end. 

— Spurgeon* 



(114) 



CHAPTER XII. 

" WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED ? " 

Observe the question. It is not how must 
Ifeel to be saved. It is not what must I think 
to be saved. But what must I do. So far as 
you are concerned, then, settle it so that it 
never again will get unsettled, that your part 
in the matter is to do something. Don't go 
back to the question of feeling and speculating 
again. Attend simply and strictly to what 
God says. 

Yet be careful to remember that you are not 
saved by doing, but fry the power of God. 
Your part is a doing, and when you have done 
your part, then, and not until then, can God 
save your soul. 

What says the Word ? 

Turn first to the third chapter of John. Here 

we find salvation described as an entering into 

the kingdom of God. And, concerning this 

entrance, Jesus says, "Ye must be born again." 

" Except a man be born again, he cannot see 

the kingdom of God " (ver. 3). 

Now these are the words of Jesus himself. 

115 



116 " EXCUSE me:' 

They are final and immutable. Heaven and 
earth may pass away, but the Word shall not 
pass away ; and his Word says that a man must 
be born again if he would enter the kingdom 
of God. And I have put this clear, unequivocal 
saying here at the outset, because it seems to 
me to comprehend all the preliminary condi- 
tions of being a Christian. To be in the king- 
dom of God is to be saved. And to get into 
the kingdom of God you must be born again. 

Is it a hard saying ? Wait ! 

But you say, " That is the very thing I do 
not comprehend. I knew before that Christ 
requires me to be born again. But how can I ? 
What is it to be born again ? " 

And does there come to you the feeling of 
some mysterious " change of heart," creeping 
in and over you, or flooding down upon you 
without option of your own % You are think- 
ing of a miracle. You cannot understand that 
mystery. It does not look as if you could 
produce any such experience yourself. If sal- 
vation begins with something you do — then 
how can it require this mysterious new birth? 
Does it not say : 

" The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou 
hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell 
whence it cometh, and whither it goeth : so is 
every one that is born of the Spirit." 



" WHAT MUST I BO TO BE SAVED? 1 ' 117 

Yes. And I would not teach you that you 
can produce regeneration yourself. Never- 
theless, would you not think that when the 
Lord says so positively that we must be born 
again, and cannot be saved unless we are, that 
somewhere, somehow, he would tell us plainly 
how we are born again, and what it is to be 
born again ! 

And that is just what he does. 

I think the matter is made plain in this very 
third chapter of John ; but in another place, 
John, the same John who wrote this gospel, 
makes it unequivocally plain. 

The Saviour says clearly, 

" Ye must be born again." 

And John, inspired of God, says just as 
plainly : 

" Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the 
Christ is born of God." — 1 John 5 : 1. 

How can that be any plainer? But it is 
only what is said in various forms all through 
the Word. In the same third chapter of John, 
16th verse, Jesus himself explains that men are 
to be saved by believing on him. Paul an- 
swered this very question, " What shall I do to 
be saved ?" by saying "Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ and thou shalt be saved." And John 
says (John 1 : 12), "As many as received him, to 
them gave he power (or right) to become the 



118 "EXCUSE ME." 

sons of God, even to them that believe on his 
name, which were born, not of blood, nor of the 
will of flesh, nor of the will of man, btct of 
God" Here the new birth is plainly shown to 
be by belief on Jesus Christ. 
It is very clear then, 

1. That you must be born again. 

2. That you are to be born again by believ- 
ing on Jesus Christ. 

On these two rocks plant your feet. Do not 
let them go out of your mind. Do not let any 
other issue divert you. These are the two 
great steps of conversion and regeneration. 

You see you are not to be born again through 
some feeling. Feeling I trust you will have, 
but the Scriptures do not require any special 
kind of feeling (unless love for God be counted 
a feeling). The Scriptures say nothing at all 
about how you will feel when you are born 
again. Does that startle you ? after all this 
life-long notion of yours that the new birth 
was some kind of strange spiritual sensation ? 
And here is the only book in the world entitled 
to speak with authority on the subject. Yet it 
is absolutely silent about feeling. It neither 
tells how you will feel, nor requires that you 
must feel in any particular way whatever! 
Pause and settle that point once for all. The 
Bible tells us what the new birth is, and how 



44 WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?" 119 

it is to be had, but it says not a word, in this 
connection, about a state of feeling, 

Now, I believe in a " change of heart," in a 
right sense of that word (though the phrase is 
not in Scripture), and I believe in feeling right 
about our religion. I only say that to be born 
again is not to meet a " change of heart " or 
feeling, but it is to believe. "Whosoever 
believeth ... is born of God." And if that 
is entirely plain and finally settled, then we 
are ready to inquire into this thing we call 
belief, to see what it is. For if you did not 
know what the new birth is, very probably you 
may be in error as to what it really is to believe 
in Christ. 

Let me show you by a concrete Scripture 
example. In Matt. 9 : 9 we read : 

" And as Jesus passed by from thence, he 
saw a man, called Matthew, sitting at the place 
of toll : and he saith unto him, Follow me. 
And he arose and followed him." 

How do we know that Matthew believed on 
Jesus ? There is only one possible evidence of 
his faith. We know that he believed, because 
he did what Jesus told him to do / he arose at 
the call and followed him. It was the same 
with Peter, Andrew, James, and John (Matt. 
4 : 18-22). 

What is it to believe on Jesus ? It is to be 



120 " EXCUSE ME." 

in the spirit of doing whatever he tells you 
to do. i 

That means that you have once for all givenl 
up every other ambition, to do Christ's will. 
It means surrender and consecration of all to 
doing his will. 

It is not the mere belief that Jesus lives or 
lived, that he was divine, and the best being in 
the world. All this you may believe and yet 
not really believe in Christ. It is the absolute, 
complete, final submission of your whole life to 
Christ's guidance, by one supreme act of faith. 
It is the soul saying to Christ : " For once and 
for all, for time and for eternity, for joy and 
for sorrow, for life or for death, come weal or 
woe, by day and by night, forever and forever, 
I will follow thee." And it means the act- 
ual beginning to follow this very hour. 

Is that all ? 

Yes. Absolutely all ! 

But must I not repent? Yes. But when- 
ever you can thus dedicate yourself, you have 
repented. You have done more. You have 
cast out every enemy of Christ, and left for- 
ever everything that Christ hates. 

But must I not be remorseful over my sins ? 
I think you will be, but the Scriptures do not 
make that a duty. You have nothing to do 
with trying to be remorseful. If you are so, you 



" WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?" 121 

will not enjoy it, and the sooner you under- 
stand that God has forgiven the sins and lifted 
you out of them, the better it will be. 

But must I not feel the " witness of the 
Spirit " that I am accepted ? I will not deny 
that you may. But why do you not read the 
Spirit's witness and believe that ? Is not the 
written Word reliable? And when that tells 
you that if you believe in Jesus you are born 
of God, why must you doubt it until you feel 
somehow ? I only say for myself that I have 
the strongest feelings on the subject I ever have 
at all, when, out of God's own book, I am as- 
sured that / am a child of God. 

For I say that if you have believed on Jesus 
you have the right and the power to call your- 
self a child of God. You are born again. If 
any one asks you how you know, you have not 
to say, " I have the witness of the Spirit that 
I feel," but you can say, " I know because God 
says so." Where does he say so ? In his own 
book. And if the Spirit of God gives you any 
worthy assurance within, it may come, and it 
ought to come, after and because you believe 
what God says. 

But the Word does say that they who believe 
on Christ are born again, or born of God, and 
those who are born of God are God's children. 
If you do not believe that, then you dispute not 



122 " excuse me: 1 

with me but with the book. You might easily 
be in doubt, even about your most spiritual 
feelings. You may very easily be deceived 
about those ecstasies that often go by the name 
" Witness of the Spirit ; " but if you can turn 
to the Word of God and say, " Look here, this 
is my ground of assurance. The Word says I 
am saved," no one can gainsay that. It is 
always the same, and it is final authority. 

The only doubt any one need to have, whether 
or not he is saved, must come from the imperfect 
character of your consecration. Have you done 
the thing needed, and have you done it 
thoroughly f If you can say yes — say it in the 
light of God's word, say it with a perfectly 
clear conscience — if nothing has been reserved, 
if you have committed all to Christ, and now 
rely upon him to save you, then you have the 
right to believe that you are accepted of God. 
He promises distinctly that whosoever cometh 
to him shall not be cast out. And he promises 
to redeem, sanctify, and glorify those who be- 
lieve on his name. Born again by belief on his 
name, you are saved, not indeed ~by your belief, 
but in answer to your belief. You have only 
then to look to Jesus, and follow him, as you 
have surrendered yourself to do. 

Yes. So far as becoming a Christian is con- 
cerned, that is all of it. 



u 



WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED /" 123 



You are still amazed that it is so simple and 
so plain. "Wait a moment. Now it is so plain, 
there is a more important question. Will you 
do it ? Have you done it ? 

For, plain as it is, and simple as it seems, 
after all it is to most men the very hardest thing 
they can think about. Naaman's servant told 
ISTaaman that if the prophet had bid him do 
some hard thing he would have done it without 
hesitation. But to plunge in a river seven 
times — why he might have done that in his 
own rivers of Pharpar and Abana. And so 
you — now it is so very plain what you must do 
to be saved — are you ready to do it ? 

Ah, there is the very pinch of the case. 

Easy, but so unutterably hard. What! to 
break down all that selfish pride ! What ! and 
must I turn and crucify all these sins of mine ? 
and give up my selfish ways of thinking and 
living? Must I submit all my life to Jesus 
Christ, and absolutely do whatever he requires ? 

Yes, my friend. That is the only saving 
belief there is, a belief that overturns you from 
top to bottom, a belief that alters your whole 
way of thinking, feeling, and living, that sets 
the seal of a curse on your sins and then takes 
them away, that breaks all the proud resistance 
of your hard, hard heart, and makes you as a 
little child. Do not think, therefore, because 



124 " excuse me: 1 

the way is plain, that you can jump into it 
without any change. Plain as it is, it is such 
that, when a man enters it, he must strip off 
his last iniquity, and cast himself a helpless 
and undone sinner on the saving mercy of his 
God. - 

" Then it does mean repentance and reform, 
doesn't it ? " 

Well, I have never denied that : I only said 
repentance and reform are not what saves. 
Christ saves, and saves not in answer to our 
repentance and reform, but in answer to our 
belief. The one last, first, unvarying word of 
God laid on the sinner is this: BELIEVE. 
And I have tried to show you how this means 
consecration and surrender, a real following of 
Christ wherever he requires us to go, a real 
doing of whatever he tells us to do. But, as 
we are to find out how Christ means us to 
begin by going to the Scriptures, so we must 
go to the Scriptures to find out what he 
wants us to do. We are not to do what man 
requires, but what God requires. Men may 
help us to understand what God requires, by 
reasonably reading and interpreting the Scrip- 
tures, but our belief must at last be shown bv 
doing the commands that God lays on us in 

______ * 

his own Word. 

And still the question recurs : Now that you 



" WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?" 125 

know this plain way, and how very plain it is, 
will you do the one thing required ? "Whether 
you will or not, I would like you to consider 
whether the way ought to be made any easier. 
Would you respect a requirement that did not 
require everything ? What if you could do 
Christ's will and not give up all ? How much 
would his religion be worth ? No ; just be- 
cause belief in Christ requires the heart's per- 
fect allegiance, has it been the mighty power 
that has changed the whole world. It has 
made martyrs, and overturned evils, and cre- 
ated civilizations. Whether you will do it or 
not, you know and I know that anything less 
would be a mistake. It is all or nothing. If 
a man love even his own life more than 
Christ, he cannot be a disciple. Christ says so. 
So when I invite you to this life in Christ, I 
am putting on you the greatest honor any man 
can receive. If you do accept Christ, it means 
an experience that will so revolutionize you that 
you will presently know it as the most im- 
portant act of your life. It is not a little in- 
significant thing to which God calls you. 
Heirship, kingship, heaven, and eternal blessed- 
ness are in it. It is the doorway to joy un- 
speakable and full of glory. 



"We do not understand the supreme, the unutterable 
interest embraced in religion, when we think to give 
less to it than our whole heart. — Dewey. 

Are you in earnest? If so, though your faith be weak, 
and your struggles unsatisfactory, you may begin to 
triumph now — for victory is pledged.— Robertson. 

He that has cast out his last bosom sin, and said with 
truth, " I will strive to give an unreserved obedience to 
God," has little to fear in life and nothing in death." 

—Elizabeth Peabody. 



(126) 



CHAPTEE XIII. 

SETTLE THE QUESTION. 

It has not been by any inadvertence that 
I have confined this little message entirely 
to the human work in salvation. If I have 
made it clear what you must do to be saved, 
and how your excuses avail nothing, I shall 
not be troubled that I have omitted to tell 
you the other side. If I have made a one- 
sided book, I can only say I have succeeded 
in doing that which I deliberately intended. 
To have written adequately the other side 
would have required the reproduction of the 
entire body of Scripture theology. 

Yet there is some need, perhaps, to guard 
against the feeling that we are to think much 
about our own part in salvation. I have only 
shown it to be the important thing, because 
it is the only part that we can ourselves 
perform. 

It is a moot question Avith certain denomi- 
nations still, whether a man's very ability to 
believe on Christ is imparted to him. I will 

not re-open that question. But no one will 

127 



128 "EXCUSE ME." 

deny that the sinner, every sinner, has done 
for him, before he acts at all, a work that he 
could not do himself, and so I am able to en- 
force in this closing chapter the responsibility 
that God lays on men to be saved. And I 
have never apprehended that men are lost, pri- 
marily, because they are sinners. They are 
lost because, being sinners, they do not heed 
what God has done for them, and accept the 
offers that God holds out. 

To you, for whom I write this little book, let 
me say that it is not with you a matter of con- 
venience, and of your own whim or pleasure, 
to accept Christ or not. There are some pres- 
sures that Christ is exercising in this world 
that prevent you from escaping the question 
easily. Tou have thought, perhaps, that at 
most it is a question of taking Christ or having 
the world. At the worst, you can fear only a 
just punishment of your sins, if you do not 
choose him. You do not hate your sins, and you 
do not see that you are bad enough to deserve 
the tortures of hell. And you are unable to be- 
lieve that any such fate awaits you, merely on ac- 
count of the sins of a short lifetime ; that they, 
at the worst, are neither gross nor very vicious. 

It is this persistency of yours in missing the 
point that I wish to correct. You are not only 
a sinner, but you have rejected Christ. This 



SETTLE THE QUESTION. 129 

is the serious condition, and to this you ought 
to attend. You very well know that an atone- 
ment has been made. Christ has suffered, and 
suffered for you. Let me not describe the 
cross. Words are trivial to set out its horrible 
significance. You may look on it for yourself. 
For this cross has been preached to you, and 
you know the story of the love it reveals. 

Now, it might matter very little that you 
are a sinner. But you have seen the cross, and 
from this hour your sin means all that the 
cross means. You have not merely broken the 
law of God by sin — you have despised his 
broken body and his redeeming blood. What 
are all your other sins to this sin ? Nothing. 

No one can look on Christ without being 
made worse for it, if he is not made better. 
And you have no excuse. A Christian mother, 
perhaps, has prayed for you, a Christian church 
has labored with you, the preacher has preached 
to you, the Bible has been taught to you. In 
the silence of your heart, at midnight, the 
Spirit has come to you. The wounds of a cru- 
cified Saviour are mouths to speak to you of his 
love. Offers of salvation are they all. And 
yet you are not a Christian. You neglect the 
grace of God. You are sinning away that day 
of grace that is given you. 

That you are a sinner — that need not trouble 



130 "EXCUSE ME." 

you so much. All men are sinners. But that 
you, a sinner, can say to God, " You shall not 
forgive my sin," that is unspeakably fatal. And 
you may see now the difference between your- 
self and a Christian. You have been measur- 
ing it as a merely moral difference. You do 
not feel concerned about yourself, because you 
pay your debts, just as well as Christians do — 
better than some. You are as good as they 
are in every way — better than some. But here 
is a difference that you ought to comprehend. 
It is a difference to make you shudder if you 
do really comprehend it. You have not ac- 
cepted Christ ; I have. You have no Saviour ; 
I have. You have no One to forgive your sins ; 
I have. You have no promise of heaven; I 
have. You are going j^our own way ; I am 
going with Christ. I have a home, an inherit- 
ance, a rest ; you have nothing. 

The reason for the difference is not moral. 
It is personal. The reason is that I believe on 
Christ, and you do not. You may be to-day a 
better man morally than I am ; but I have a 
promise of being made perfect in him some day, 
while you have only your own will to depend 
upon. You will not, on the whole, grow better. 
I shall be clothed at last in the spotless right- 
eousness of my Redeemer. Trusting in Christ, 
I am even now so clothed. 



SETTLE THE QUESTION. 131 

Is there not a difference ? 

And can you not see that all the good there 
is for you in this world and in the next must be 
found in Christ ? And you have no Christ ! 

Do I put the matter sharply ? Not so sharply 
as Christ puts it, " Except ye be born again, ye 
cannot see the kingdom of God." 

And if you have read this book thus far, 
perhaps it may be time to say, " JVow is your 
chance." Drop the book and go to the Book, 
and to your knees, and do not rise until you 
have forever settled the question. Your excuses 
are only devil's temptations. There is one 
thing and only one to do. If you want 
Christ, take him. He is waiting to receive 
you. 

Settle the question NOW. 

If I believe anything, I believe I shall stand 
with my Saviour in the glory by and by. If 
you, who have read these pages, shall follow 
their counsel, you will meet me there. 

" What a meeting there will be." 

What if, perchance, you may be able to say 
in that glad hour, " I did as you bade me — and 

I AM HERE." 

And may I never know it — it would mar 
heaven's song, if I should — of any soul wander- 
ing away in the outer twilight that deepens to 
midnight, having heard my message, who, 



132 " EXCUSE ME." 

nevertheless, turned away and said in his hard- 
ness of heart, " Excuse me." 

Excuse me from the great eternal hallelujah 
chorus of the redeemed. I have rejected Christ, 
and I cannot sing that song. 

Excuse me from the group of loved ones gone 
before. They are there, but I have no part 
with them. 

Excuse me from the ineffable presence of the 
world's crowned King of kings. He died for 
me, and I crucified him afresh. I cannot meet 
him now. Excuse me. 

Yet shall the harps strike, and the chorus 
shall roll through the courts. Blazing day shall 
shine on these forever and forever. Joys that 
man cannot imagine, raptures, and glories, and 
beatitudes. Life is there, life forever, immortal 
gardens of God, unspeakable and beatific com- 
munion of the saints. They will fill eternity. 
If you are not there, they will go on. 

And you f 

You for whom Christ died ? 

You who might be there also ? 

And you ? 

"Well. It was your own request. You said, 
" Excuse me," when Christ called. 

And you have been excused. 




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